Why You Can't Stop Porn Without Dealing With What's Underneath

You've been fighting porn for years. Maybe decades. Accountability software, men's groups, therapy, streaks that fell apart. You're starting to wonder if something's fundamentally broken in you. Here's what nobody's told you: porn isn't the problem. It's what's on the surface. The real work is underneath. In this episode, I walk you through the four-part framework I use with every man I coach: Pain, Pressure, Pattern, and Path. You'll hear the story of a man who carried a wound for 26 years and what finally changed when he stopped fighting the symptom and started tending the root. If you're tired of white-knuckling your way through another failed streak, listen to this. **Take the Pressure Assessor:** https://rscky.com/pressure-lp **Learn more:** https://rscky.com

Quit Porn | Restoration Soul Care helps men get past willpower and behavior management to the root — the pain, pressure, and disconnection underneath the pattern. Hosted by Michael Kamber and Nick Buda.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hey, welcome to the Restoration Skull Care podcast, where we have honest conversations about faith, neuroscience, and hope. I'm Michael Camper, a relationship and recovery coach.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

And I'm Nick Buda, a mental health and relationship coach. If you feel stuck in shame, addiction, or pain, you don't have to face it alone. Join us for some real stories, real tools, and a real path forward. Let's dive in.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Hey, welcome back today. I'm going to do something a little bit different. I'm going to uh tell you about a guy that I met a while back. And then I'm going to walk you through a four-part framework that I've been hanging everything on more recently because I think it's helpful to hear things in that context. Nick's not here today. He sends all of his love and says he uh misses you, and by you, I mean sitting in front of a camera and talking. Uh but hopefully we'll have him back in the next week. Summer always gets dicey with schedules and stuff. So but to get into it, um, this guy that I'm going to call David called me on a Wednesday afternoon. Uh he'd been five days clean. He was just sitting in his truck in the parking lot at work, and uh he had looked at porn. Um I think it was on his lunch break that same day. Uh, but he couldn't, he couldn't um he had like sort of a panic moment and went back to his truck, but he couldn't he couldn't bring himself to get back up and go back into work. Um David had been fighting this since he was a little kid. Um I think he was he told me he was 12 when it started and in his mid-30s now. He's married with two kids, good job. He'd been fighting it, I think, for around 20, 20-ish, 23 years. And by the time he'd found me, he uh, you know, like most people, had probably done it all. Accountability software, men's group, uh, two different therapists across, you know, in the last 10 years, two, you know, in the last decade. Um, he had achieved 30 days, a 30-day streak that he told me about one time, and I don't even remember, this was years ago, but he kind of talked about it like it was a war story. But that afternoon in in the truck, he was sure that there was something deeply or uh fundamentally wrong with him, some kind of character uh defect maybe God forgot to fix. Um but he told me he was starting to think that he just was not going to beat this thing. And I told him something that I tell almost every guy who walks into this work is that uh nothing is wrong with you that makes sense to you yet. Porn is not the problem. The porn is what's on the surface, and we have to find out what's underneath. And he pushed back a little bit. He thought I was changing the subject because he came to deal with porn. That's what everybody comes to me with. But if you've done some work with me, you quickly realize, like, yes, we're talking about porn, but sometimes it sort of gets pushed to the background because porn isn't the real issue. And when we start dealing with the real issue, the porn starts to go away. But it can be a little confusing in the moment because porn is the main thing that we see that's causing the disruption. So uh he was asking me, what's all this underneath stuff? And uh by the end of I think it was our second or third session, he was telling me about his his dad, uh, about something specific that happened when he was nine. Um something that he had never told anybody else in his entire life, including his wife. And see this, here here's where the work actually started. That's the thing that we actually had to get to, and it it was not the porn. I want to give you a way that I started thinking about this, and I, you know, I may not use these exact words if I'm with you in session, but I I use this um internally as my own framework as I'm talking through stuff. Um and I'm gonna use it with you for the next uh 15 minutes or so. I'm gonna walk you through it. Four words, uh, they all start with P because that's you know how these things work. Uh I'm a former pastor, so deal with it. Pain, pressure, pattern, and path. Those four things. Um, real quick, if you're new to me, my name is Michael Camber. I run Restoration Soul Care here in Louisville, and I sit with men one at a time who want to be free from pornography for real and for good. We don't do it by fighting harder or trying more. We do it by going underneath the surface and figuring out what the actual root cause is. And if you're listening to this in your truck or in your car on a lunch break or in your kitchen at midnight, or in your headphones or ear pods because you can't say any of this out loud yet, I hear you. I'm talking to you. Stay with me. All right, let's get into it. The first P is pain. And pain is the wound, something older than this morning. And one of the world's foremost trauma and addiction experts, his name is Gabor Mate. He says uh this thing, he says, we don't ask why the addiction. That's that's the wrong question. He says the real question is where's the pain? Find the pain, sort it out, and then the addiction goes away. For David, uh, this guy that I'm talking about, uh, the thing from where he was nine, he had been living in had been living inside him for 26 years. He had never told anybody, not his wife, not his pastor, not in either the therapist that he saw. He didn't really think it had anything to do with the porn, because in his head, it was a separate thing. It was totally a totally different uh issue. So I sat with him uh while he told me, and I I didn't fix it, I didn't reframe it, uh, I didn't give him a Bible verse to slap on it. Uh I just let him say it out loud, probably for the first time in his entire life. And he cried. Um this is a grown, successful man. Um he honestly had no idea why he was crying, and he he kept apologizing for it, which was unnecessary. Um but that's pain. That's what pain looks like. Something that got in a long time ago that never got out. And just because we don't talk about it, just because we don't share it, doesn't mean that it's not actively disrupting us internally. Um here's something to sit with for a second. Um we were wounded in relationship, almost always. The wound that is running uh the wound that's running your life right now came through someone. What they did, what they didn't do, what they said, what they couldn't be. And the reason it's still in you is because it never got out through relationship either. Uh whatever happened to you, you carried it alone, and that's the wound. We say we're wounded in relationship, but we're also healed in relationship. That was God's plan A for you, that you were healed in relationship. So here's where it gets tricky. Most guys don't even know that they have a wound like that. They had a normal childhood, right? Parents stayed married, nobody hit them, nobody touched them, they can't point to a story, and they end up sitting across from me telling me that they don't know why they can't stop. Um you don't need what we call a capital T trauma uh to have buried pain because pain isn't about necessarily how bad it looks uh on paper. Pain is about what got in, like I said, and what never came back out. So it might be that your dad never told you that he was proud of you. It might be a night you stood in the hallway and listened to your parents fight about whether they wanted to stay together or not. It might be a friend group that turned on you in seventh grade and you still flinch a little when you walk into a room full of new people. It might be the version of yourself that you became at 16, alone in your bedroom, that you never told anybody about. You don't really have to know what exactly it is yet. You just have to be willing to find it. One of my favorite Psalms is Psalm 139 where he says, Search me, O God, and know me. I think about that verse a lot in this work because uh most of the men that I sit with have spent their entire lives making sure nobody searches them. Not God, certainly not their wives, not themselves. They keep that door locked because they're afraid of what's behind it, and they're more afraid that if somebody found out uh about that thing, that they would be rejected, they wouldn't be loved, and that people would leave them. And what I what I'm here to tell you today is that what's behind uh is almost never as bad as what it cost you to keep the door shut. Let me say that again. What's behind the door is almost never as bad as what it cost you to keep that door shut. That's pain. The next part of this is pressure. So we've got the wound underneath. That's pain. Pressure is what happens when you add life on top of it. Um back to David for a second, he has a wife, two kids, a job with a pretty demanding boss, uh, a mortgage, truck payment, a back that hurts when he sleeps wrong, a church that he serves at on Sundays, um, in-laws that he doesn't necessarily get along with, uh, one of his kids, his son, is uh struggling in school. That's just scary when your kids struggle in school. Um some nights he gets about four solid hours of sleep, and not because he's up doing anything, just because his brain won't shut off long enough for him to actually rest. Now, none of that on its own is a crisis. It's just life. Every man you know is dealing with some version of that. Here's the thing, though. If you're a man who's tended his wound, life pressure is just life pressure. It's hard sometimes, sure, sometimes brutal, but you've got the capacity for it. That's what we call our window of tolerance. You've got people, you've got rest, you've got a system that can more uh readily absorb that load. But um if you're a man who's got some pain buried underneath the surface that you're not dealing with, all of that pressure is landing on that system that's already at capacity because the wound is taking up the majority of the room, and the wound is the load before the load. This is why, if you think about it, why some guys can handle uh like a really rough week, a really rough week either uh at work or at home with kids, and other guys uh they come unglued the moment their wife snaps at them on a Tuesday. Um could be the same week, totally different gauge. This is where most men actually live, by the way. Not in some big crisis that you noticed. It's the chronic, quiet, low grade overload that looks fine if anybody says, hey, how are you? And like, oh, I'm good, I'm doing good. We show up, we make the make the meetings, we mow the lawn, um, kiss our kids, pray at dinner, and the gauge still sits in the red week after week, year after year, until we don't even hear the alarm anymore. Another one of my uh favorite verses in scripture, Proverbs 4.23, says, Guard your heart, for from it flow the springs of life. I know that verse gets used a lot for what content people consume. Um the original is uh move is way more interior than that. It's guard your heart. That means to know your heart, tend it, watch what's there. Most of us aren't guarding our hearts. We are probably ignoring them. There's a difference between standing, watch over something, and stuffing it in a closet and turning up the TV. Um real quick, I do want to tell you about this. I built a tool specifically for this to give you a clear read on where your pressure actually is. It's called the pressure assessor. Um I'm gonna come back to the end, but don't let me forget. It's at rscky.com backslash pressure. Um for now, sit with this. Pressure that builds with no honest release is going to find a dishonest one. We have to find ways to release the pressure. And quick hint: it's a relational. It's always relational. Um, so we got pain, we got pressure. Number three is the pattern. This is where the pattern comes in. It's whatever you do when the pressure gets too high. Uh, for the men in uh the work that I do, it's porn. For other guys, it's alcohol, for others, it's food, work, rage, scrolling, sometimes affairs, gambling, sports betting is real big now for a lot of guys to just sort of dip into um quietly checking out of their own lives. The real struggle here is like, yes, porn is problematic and we deal with that, but um the more dangerous thing is for you to dip into something that's more socially or relationally acceptable, um like scrolling or like watching TV shows or even I you know sports betting is all the rage now. Um but it's like on the surface, it's like, oh yeah, uh, you know, just have a hobby in sports betting. But really it's like occupying that same space. So the substance changes. Um the but the job it's doing is identical. It's the way the system gets rid of pressure with ever uh without ever having to deal with the real pain. So here's something I want you to hear because most guys have never heard a frame this way. Porn is not a lust problem, it's a trust problem. The definition of addiction, the real one, the one that actually explains what's happening to you, is trying to get your needs met in isolation. That's the definition of addiction. You feel something, you can't bring it to anybody because you can't bring it to anybody because you don't trust them, you don't trust yourself. So you bring it to a screen because the screen doesn't ask anything of you. It doesn't see you, it doesn't know you, and that's exactly why it works. We were made by a relational God for relationships. We were wired, we were wired by relationship, for relationship, sustained in relationship. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it's connection. So when men can't so when a man can't bring his real self to his relationship, his fear, shame, grief, anger, loneliness to another real person or to God, he brings it somewhere else. Pornography oftentimes is that somewhere else. Here's the part that nobody wants to hear. The pattern works. If it didn't work, you wouldn't do it, and it works. That's why it's so hard to stop. Um if it didn't work, like I said, you would have quit 15 years ago, but you didn't, because it works. It does exactly what you're asking it to do. For 15 minutes, for 30 minutes, for an hour, you're not in your body. You're not feeling the wound underneath the pressure on top. Um you're checked out, and then it ends up, and then it ends and dumps you back into real life with a fresh load of shame stacked on top of everything that you came in with, and you're more alone than when you started. So, to be clear, porn doesn't actually work, it sells you on the fact that it works, and then it actually doesn't. Romans, uh, in Romans 7, Paul um says this. He says, What I want to do, I do not do. What I hate, that's what I do. This is the verse that ought to come up for every guy who's tried hard and failed at this and started to wonder if something is broken in his soul. Paul's right there in the same room with you, uh, with us. The man underneath knows what he wants, the man under the load does something else. That's not necessarily weakness. It's someone trying to carry a wound alone that he was never meant to carry alone. So when David told me, uh, Michael, I just need more discipline. I had to be honest with him. He doesn't have a discipline problem. He ran a 30-day streak. He's already disciplined. He has a loneliness problem, he has a trust problem. He has a wound that nobody knows about and pressure that he can't talk about, and a release valve that finally feels like his. How did I say this? Uh you can't outdiscipline your loneliness. You can't out-discipline your wound or your pain. Um it's too much. You weren't meant to. Let me stop just for a moment. Um, because sometimes before people hear this, uh they might think I'm letting letting guys off the hook. And let me say something. I'm not. You are completely responsible for your actions and what you do with your eyes, with your time, with your body, with your marriage. Nothing I said takes away any of that. But you can be 100% responsible for what you do and be 100% clear that it's not the root of why you do it. Both are true at the same time, and uh until you see both, you're gonna keep fighting the wrong war. Okay, back at it. Here's the fourth P path. Path is the way through. Here's what path actually means in our work. We were wounded in relationship and we're healed in relationship. That's not like a just like a nice phrase to say, though it sounds nice. That's the architecture of how this whole thing works. The wound came through people, the healing comes through people. You don't get out of this one alone uh because you weren't supposed to. And I'm not gonna pretend I can lay out all out, lay it all out in five minutes uh on a podcast. I'm aware of that limitation. Uh sometimes it takes hours to unpack this with with people because everybody's different. Your story's unique, your life's unique, your wounding is unique, and um it just takes time. But the path is the real work, and it takes time, and it takes people, and it takes God meeting you in the places that you have been hiding from him for a long time. But I can I can tell you sort of what it looks like. You tend to the pain, which means you actually find what's in there. You go into the room that you've been keeping locked, um, and you don't do it alone. That's the main part that matters. You do it with somebody, somebody who knows how to be in that room with you and not flinch and not fix and not run. And you let God in there too. Most guys have never let God in the room where the wound is. They let him in the polished room with the clean carpet and where everything looks nice and great, uh, but not the room with the locked door. And then you you have to release the pressure, honestly. Which I know sounds simple, but it's not. Um it means that you actually rest. You actually build one or two relationships where you can say true things and not get judged. Safe places, safe people you can go and let your hair down around. Um you actually pray in a way that is real, that is actually asking God for what you need in confessing what's true, and not in a way that just makes you look good or sound good. Um you actually look at how much you're carrying and decide maybe I need to put some of this down. A lot of guys I work with um are running a system designed for half the load that they have on it. And we can build a bigger system for sure to carry more of the load, but we also have to get honest about the load. And some things we we need to we do have to carry because that's what life is, and some things uh we don't. Some things we're just carrying because we've been told we have to carry them or we don't trust that anybody can help us carry those. Um you replace the pattern with presence. This is the part nobody tells you. You don't just stop the porn, you replace the function porn was serving, which was, remember, getting a need met in isolation. The path is bringing the need into relationship instead. Real presence with God, real presence with people, your wife, uh, real presence with one or two with one or two men who actually know your story, and real presence with yourself when nobody is watching. One of my favorite stories in scripture um is when Jesus says, Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy, my burden is late. I I think I maybe got that wrong. The idea there is that Jesus is inviting you to yoke up to him. And if you've been around church, you've heard this analogy used a hundred times. Um an ox can't be yoked up to two things at the same time. You can only have one one yoke per ox. And the idea is that uh an ox is yoked up to another ox. And there's a whole thing about being evenly yoked so that you can accurately uh uh share the burden, right? Share the weight that uh of the cart that you're pulling the plow. Um and so when Jesus uses this imagery, it's so interesting because what he's inviting you to do is to set your burden down and take on his for a little bit. And uh, if we're gonna beat the analogy to death, uh what Jesus is inviting you to do is work with him. We're gonna plow a field. That's the whole point of why you ox up, uh yoke up an ox to a thing, or we're gonna pull something heavy. Um And Jesus says that's that's the rest, that's how we slow down. And that that requires trust. We have to trust that Jesus is gonna be present with us and do the work with us and not abandon us in the middle of the field when things get hard. Um here's what we gotta know. This is the beautiful part of this picture, is that Jesus is the bigger, stronger ox, and he is taking more of the burden, taking on more of our burden than we are. And that's good news. It doesn't mean that we don't show up and do the work, it doesn't mean that we don't participate, it absolutely means all that. But know that um Jesus is there present with us and he's helping us and he's working alongside of us. We gotta remember that. Um back to David, um I think he's about eight months in now, um, and he hasn't been perfect. He's had a couple of really hard weeks earlier this year. Uh, but what he tells me every time that we talk is that his life feels different underneath. He's he has started sleeping. He's uh a little more softer with his wife and his kids. He sat with his nine-year-old, I remember him telling this, he sat with his nine-year-old son the other day, um, and he was listening to him talk about something that was scaring him at school. And David started to cry, not in a weird way, just kind of quiet and present. Um, but afterwards he sat in his truck again uh in the same parking lot and he texted me, this is the first time I felt like a father, because he was actually able to see his son and relate and empathize and be on the level with him because he had the capacity to. He wasn't distracted from protecting the secret. This is sort of one of the things that guns goes unnoticed a lot, is that protecting the secret takes up a lot of mental space and it keeps you distracted and it keeps you disconnected from the people in your life that need you. Um but that's the path. It's not somebody who's white knuckling, um, it's a guy who's actually connected to himself, to his people, and to God. And uh, you know, for David, it was probably the first time in his adult life that that happened. Jesus said, I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. This is not the life of a man who's just barely holding on. That's the life of a guy who's been cut loose from the thing that had him. Okay, here's what I want you to do before before I forget. Go to rscy.com backslash pressure, and I want you to take the this uh the pressure assessor that I built. It's it's one, it's free, so it doesn't cost you anything. It's 16 questions, it will take you less than five minutes. Um, and nobody's gonna see that but you, um, unless you want me to see it, obviously I can look at it. Um this is not a gimmick, uh, it's I'm not selling you anything, it's it's a diagnostic tool that I made to measure this exact thing. And um it's designed to tell you the truth about where you actually are and probably what nobody else in the room sees. And for most guys who have taken it, it's the first honest read that they have ever had on themselves. It's gonna measure you across four categories um tolerance, stability, resilience, and adaptability. And it's gonna show you where which one of Those is the weakest, so that that's where we know where to start. But it really is building tolerance. And the reason I call those, I call them skills, they're four skills because skills can be enhanced and developed and taught and learned. And a lot of the times what we believe is that, well, I'm just gonna struggle with this for the rest of my life. There's nothing I can do about it, and that's simply just not true. So I'm gonna link that in the show notes down below. So go hit that, go check that out. Um I just want to encourage you, like I've I've said this before, if you close this episode and take no action, nothing will change. So if that's you, scroll down, click that, and do that right now, before you forget, before you move on to something else in your day. Um, and think about this. Where and maybe even ask yourself where you're at today. Are you dealing with the pain? How are you handling the pressure? What's your pattern? And then do you have a path forward? And if you remember nothing else, remember this. Porn is not the actual problem. Porn is what's on the surface. The work is underneath of that, and it's not work you do alone. That's probably the most important part. You have to invite somebody in. There's a way through. I've watched a bunch of men over the years walk through it. I've walked through it myself. Um, if you want my help, reach out rscky.com backslash get started. You can find me on Instagram at MikeCamber with a K or Nick W Buddha. And I'll catch you in the next episode. Hey, thanks for joining us today. If you found this helpful, do us a huge favor and subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast app. Or better yet, send this to someone who needs encouragement.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

For more tools, resources, and information about our coaching, check out rsdky.com. Keep showing up. Yeah, we'll catch you next time.