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Self-Compassion

Self-critical over-achievers are not the only ones that lack self-compassion. Some of the kindest people do as well. (Associate professor of Human Development and Culture at the University of Texas, Kristin Neff’s) work confirms this observation: There is no correlation between the trait of self-compassion and feelings of compassion towards others. Many people, women in particular, are far more compassionate and kinder towards others than to themselves. Fortunately, self-compassion can be learned. It is a practice that can help us all become less self-critical and, by preventing the stress and turmoil thereof, allow us to be happier, more successful, and of greater service to others. Self-compassion does not mean we stop working hard and aiming for success. Instead, it is a change in attitude and is linked with greater well-being as well as superior performance outcomes. Nor does self-compassion imply self-indulgence. For example, a parent who cares about her child will insist on the child eating vegetables and doing her homework, no matter how unpleasant these experiences are for the child. Similarly, taking it easy on yourself may be appropriate in some situations, but in times of over-indulgence and laziness, self-compassion involves toughening up and taking responsibility. When you are motivated by self-compassion, you understand failure not as a painful indicator of defeat but as a learning opportunity from which growth can follow. Whereas self-criticism leads to painful and self-defeating emotions in the face of failure, Self-Compassion therefore embraces challenge. People with higher self-compassion are therefore more likely to improve their performance after failure! Moreover, by preventing the defeating effects of self-criticism, self-compassion allows us to maintain peace of mind and thereby retain our energy. By remaining calm and understanding in the face of rejection, failure or criticism, we develop level-headedness, strength and emotional stability which allow us to have higher well-being and to be more productive and successful. From “Overcoming Shame: The Powerful Benefits of a Little Self-Love” by Emma Seppala, Ph.D
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/feeling-it/201211/overcoming-shame-the-powerfulbenefits-little-self-love

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” – Henry David Thoreau

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I’ve Never Been to Counseling Before – 7 Cautions

http://porntopurity.com/blog/2013/09/10/i%e2%80%99ve-never-been-to-counseling-before/
by Jeff Fisher on September 10, 2013

Recently, I’ve heard several guys and couples mention that they’ve never been to counseling before.

“You know, in our 11 years of marriage, we’ve never been to counseling”

“I was never bad enough to need counseling.”

“God is my counselor, why would I need to pay someone for that?”

Some talk about counseling like it is beneath them, like it is for the “really messed up” people, but never them.

I want to suggest a few things… some hunches for you to ponder.

1.  You Probably Have a Pride Issue. If you think you’re somehow better because you’ve never been to counseling, that’s pride… that’s self-righteousness.  None of us are better than the other person.  All of us have junk but we may be too deceived to see our true condition.

Jesus told a story of a self-righteous person who came to church, sat next to a poor man and prayed, “God, I thank thee that I’m not like that guy!”

2.  You Probably Misunderstand the Purpose of Counseling. Counseling is a lot like a private lesson for the musician.  You take private lessons to get the skills to excel in your instrument.  You need private lessons to learn new techniques or tweak what you’re already working on.  But the most valuable private lessons are to help you get through a difficult part you don’t know how to get through.

Much like a private lesson teacher, a counselor has specialized training in areas that trip us up and we are having trouble navigating.  A counselor has experience in diagnosing things we don’t know we’re doing.

3.  You Probably Have a Stack of Excuses. The more we know we need to make a change, the bigger the list of excuses.

“I can handle it on my own.”

“Counseling is too expensive.”

“I don’t have the time.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“I’ll grow of this.”

“I don’t want anyone telling me what to do.”

“Those counselors are all secular.”

4.  You Probably Have a lot of Fears and Insecurities Often we’re afraid of sharing our junk.  We’re afraid of what someone might say.  We’re afraid of what the counselor might find or tell us to do.  We don’t like to be out of control.  We don’t want anyone telling us we’re bad.  We don’t think anyone would love us if they knew what we were really like.  We might feel that God doesn’t truly love us.

Counseling is too painful.  It’s easier to keep doing what I’m doing.

5.  You Probably Have Lay Counselors in Your Life and Don’t Know it. Counseling is about discipleship.  People who are a little farther along in the journey helping us.  Men and women who understand more about the soul and healthy relationships than we do.

If you took a risk and talked to some of your friends, pastor, your Sunday School teacher, or some older men in your church you’d probably find some good help.  Perhaps you have a good friend that can help.  Perhaps someone at work.  Maybe one of your golfing or fishing buddies is the person you need to reach out to who can disciple you through.

6.  You Probably Are Not Broken Enough. We don’t want to change.  We don’t want to do something differently.  We like what we’re doing too much.  We have trouble seeing our true condition and our horrible sinfulness in God’s site.  If you really knew how your heart, mind, and actions looked to God, you would cower away in shame.  We don’t call out for help because we are not broken enough over our own sinfulness.

7.  You Probably Need to Break the Ice on Counseling. My hunch that you need to break the ice on your first counseling session.  It takes a lot of courage, but I think you’ll find a very safe place where you can get some help.

I wrote a post called “Going to a Counselor For the First Time” where I share my fears and presuppositions about counseling that all turned out to be lies.  It’s a helpful post.

FEEDBACK jeff@porntopurity.com

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7 Negative Effects of Porn

http://theresurgence.com/2011/11/19/7-negative-effects-of-porn

by BJ Stockman

This is a rather frank post on porn, so proceed, or not, with that in mind.

Porn is a problem. It’s a personal problem for many and a cultural problem for all. You may think you have not been affected by porn, but you have because it’s embedded in the surrounding culture. The staggering size of the pornography industry, its influence upon the media and the acceleration of technology, paired with the accessibility, anonymity, and affordability of porn all contribute to its increasing impact upon the culture.

Pornography affects you whether you’ve ever viewed it or not, and it is helpful to understand some of its negative effects, whether you are a man or woman, struggling with watching it, or simply a mom or dad with a son or daughter. There is a plethora of research on the detrimental effects of pornography (and I do not think that what follows are necessarily the worst of them), but here are seven negative effects of porn upon men and women:

1. Porn Contributes to Social and Psychological Problems Within Men 

Anti-pornography activist, Gail Dines, notes that young men who become addicted to porn, “neglect their schoolwork, spend huge amounts of money they don’t have, become isolated from others, and often suffer depression.” (Pornland, 93). Dr. William Struthers, who has a PhD in biopsychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, confirms some of these and adds more, finding that men who use porn become controlling, highly introverted, have high anxiety, narcissistic, curious, have low self-esteem, depressed, dissociative, distractible (Wired for Intimacy, 64-65). Ironically, while viewing porn creates momentary intensely pleasurable experiences, it ends up leading to several negative lingering psychological experiences.

2. Porn Rewires the Male Brain 

Struthers elaborates,

        As men fall deeper into the mental habit of fixating on [pornographic images], the exposure to them creates neural pathways. Like a path is created in the woods with each successive hiker, so do the neural paths set the course for the next time an erotic image is viewed. Over time these neural paths become wider as they are repeatedly traveled with each exposure to pornography. They become the automatic pathway through which interactions with woman are routed….They have unknowingly created a neurological circuit that imprisons their ability to see women rightly as created in God’s image (Wired For Intimacy, 85).

In a similar vein regarding porn’s effect upon the brain, Naomi Wolf writes in her article, “The Porn Myth,”

    After all, pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is Pavlovian. An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free eros but dilutes it.

3. Porn Turns Sex Into Masturbation 

Sex becomes self-serving. It becomes about your pleasure and not the self-giving, mutually reciprocating intimacy that it was designed for.

4. Porn Demeans and Objectifies Women 

This occurs from hard-core to soft-core pornography. Pamela Paul, in her book Pornified, quoting the research of one psychologist who has researched pornography at Texas A&M, writes,

    ‘Softcore pornography has a very negative effect on men as well. The problem with softcore pornography is that it’s voyeurism teaches men to view women as objects rather than to be in relationships with women as human beings.’ According to Brooks, pornography gives men the false impression that sex and pleasure are entirely divorced from relatoinships. In other words, pornography is inherently self-centered–something a man does by himself, for himself–by using another women as the means to pleasure, as yet another product to consume (80).

Paul references one experiment that revealed a rather shocking further effect of porn: “men and women who were exposed to large amounts of pornography were significantly less likely to want daughters than those who had none. Who would want their own little girl to be treated that way?” (80).

It becomes about your pleasure and not the self-giving, mutually reciprocating intimacy that it was designed for.

Again, it needs to be emphasized, that this is not an effect that only rests upon those who have viewed porn. The massive consumption of porn and the the size of the porn industry has hypersexualized the entire culture. Men and women are born into a pornified culture, and women are the biggest losers. Dines continues,

    By inundating girls and women with the message that their most worthy attribute is their sexual hotness and crowding out other messages, pop culture is grooming them just like an individual perpetrator would. It is slowly chipping away at their self-esteem, stripping them of a sense of themselves as whole human beings, and providing them with an identity that emphasizes sex and de-emphasizes every other human attribute (Pornland, 118).

5. Porn Squashes the Beauty of a Real Naked Woman 

Wolf, in her own blunt way, confirms this,

    For most of human history, the erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn (Quoted in Wired for Intimacy, 38).

6. Porn Has a Numbing Effect Upon Reality

It makes real sex and even the real world boring in comparison. It particularly anesthetizes the emotional life of a man. Paul comments,

    Pornography leaves men desensitivzed to both outrage and to excitement, leading to an overall diminishment of feeling and eventually to dissatisfaction with the emotional tugs of everyday life…Eventually they are left with a confusing mix of supersized expectations about sex and numbed emotions about women…When a man gets bored with pornography, both his fantasy and real worlds become imbued with indifference. The real world often gets really boring…” (Pornified, 90, 91).

7. Porn Lies About What it Means to be Male and Female 

Dines records how porn tells a false story about men and women. In the story of porn, women are “one-dimensional”–they never say no, never get pregnant, and can’t wait to have sex with any man and please them in whatever way imaginable (or even unimaginable). On the other hand, the story porn tells about men is that they are “soulless, unfeeling, amoral life-support systems for erect penises who are entitled to use women in any way they want. These men demonstrated zero empathy, respect, or love for the women they have sex with…(Pornland, xxiv).”

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Secretly Feeling Helpless

Men are cautioned to not discuss their feelings, to avoid feelings altogether and to not discuss love, sorrow or pain. Men will often make a joke out of a difficult situation rather than face it directly. Men are taught to be checked out toward the emotions of others, and keep their true feelings inside. Women frequently complain that their partner wants to have sex even though they don’t feel connected emotionally. Men want to have sex to feel connected and women want to feel connected to feel comfortable having sex. Because some men want to skip over feelings and go straight to sex, porn and prostitution has taken off since the advent of the internet. Men who find themselves avoiding confrontations and intimacy will find anonymous intimacy in internet chat rooms, porn or prostitutes. Sue Johnson, the author of “Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love”, once said that “In conflict women swim and men sink.” Men do not do as well as women in the clinches. Men have a harder time with stress reduction, and anxiety around conflict. Women have gears inside built for childbirth where they can tolerate pain. This internal mechanism to withstand anxiety and pain allows women to deal with emotional stress way better than men. Men usually avoid conflict and make every effort to make peace. For this reason they do not tend to resolve conflicts well, which creates distance in their relationships. This avoidance of confrontation, pain and anxiety can build up over time and cause the eventual breakup of a marriage. John Gottman, who wrote “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work”, writes that 80 percent of divorce is based on men not accepting the influence of the woman. What this means is that men avoid contact and don’t tend to listen because they don’t want to be seen as tied to the woman’s proverbial apron strings or be “hen pecked.” Because men must be fearless and strong, they dread appearing weak or inadequate. Because men are taught to be competitive, strong, never cry and not show emotion, they either buy into this wholeheartedly or consider all intimacy creating activities as weak and stupid or they feel like a fraud for having feelings and sensitivity at all. Men can carry feelings of inadequacy to the grave rather than ever admit how they really feel. They may develop a macho persona while secretly feeling helpless and bad or like they don’t measure up. I frequently hear men complain that they are “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.” Men feel like they have to fix things and don’t like it when they are made to feel helpless. Men aren’t supposed to feel helpless. All this is not to say that men are incapable of intimacy, dependency or vulnerability. They are quite able but our culture does not support it. One of the main reasons for drug and alcohol use is for medicating pain, and that would include emotional pain. Men, who feel bottled up, sad, angry and depressed will often become workaholics, drink or do drugs to avoid feelings. By Dr. Bill Cloke http://www.care2.com/greenliving/why-men-have-trouble-with-intimacy.html

“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.” – Alain de Botton

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Trouble With Intimacy

The other night while at dinner with some friends (all married or with someone) something occurred that is so common I barely took notice of it. One of the women popped up and went to the restroom and four other women jumped up and went with her. We’ve seen this a million times. They go off to the restroom, fix their hair, adjust something and talk about everything. If men meet up in the restroom, if they speak at all, it would be a very neutral topic like golf or baseball. I think to myself that if a man got up and went to the restroom, no one would go with him. This is of course a generalization, but in this small vignette it tells the story of the difference between men and women. So why do men have such a difficult time with intimacy? The answer is that most men are taught from an early age to be competitive, that feelings are a sign of weakness and to avoid vulnerability and dependency at all costs. The ideal for men is fierce independence and strength. Herb Goldberg writes in The Hazards of Being Male that 85 percent of the men in this country have no friends. We see beer ads that proffer an image of the American male as having tons of friends but nothing could be further from the truth. According to Goldberg men have “buddies” like golf or bowling buddies but not real friends because they don’t open up. Intimacy is based on being able to show ourselves to another person, warts and all. Men are very reluctant to do this because they fear that they might be judged or put down. Dr. Kal Heller, a licensed psychologist specializing in child and family services, writes that “Intimacy is very risky because it requires making such a serious commitment to the relationship that each person will experience a sense of dependency on the other. To admit to needing someone else is to risk loss and deep hurt.” This is difficult for all of us. Dependency is a negative concept in our society. Men, especially, are taught to strive for independence. Like that ad says, “Never let them see you sweat.” This could be our national anthem. Some of the messages men get early on are: “Big boys don’t cry”, “No pain no gain; Tough it out”, “Only sissies get hurt feelings”, “It’s a sign of weakness to let people know you’re hurting.” So many men lead lives of quiet desperation, never letting anyone in or themselves out. For men to take a look at who they really are and allow their essence to be known are actually far stronger than the burly silent types who live their lives in utter isolation. By Dr. Bill Cloke http://www.care2.com/greenliving/why-men-have-trouble-with-intimacy.html

“There’s nothing more intimate in life than simply being understood. And understanding someone else.” – Brad Meltzer