Book I: Reasons to Look The Other Way
Desire makes slaves out of kings, while patience makes kings out of slaves.
Al-Ghazali
Pornography is heroin, it’s drugs. We got kids loose in the pharmacy! We got kids running around grabbing whatever, taking all kinds of stuff, man. And you can be damaged severely.
Terry Crews
Pornography is a wholly selfish act that eclipses the concerns, needs, and well-being of everyone around you.
Heath Lambert
Almost the main work of life is to come out of ourselves, out of the little dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this prison.
C.S. Lewis
Pornography gives us unrealistic expectations of what life is supposed to be, and certainly what love or sex is supposed to be.
Gordon-Levitt
Many people who regularly indulge in pornography experience challenges in real world romantic interactions.
Andrew Huberman
Lusting over a different person on a screen every night will not prepare you to love one person the rest of your life.
Popular Wisdom
The harem [of lust] is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions, which no woman can rival.
C.S. Lewis
When you escape onto the screen, you’re teaching your brain that isolation is safe and that connection and socialization are not safe.
Trish Leigh
Oftentimes what will happen is the [addict] only has excitement and can achieve dopamine release to the same extent doing that behavior and not other behaviors. And so they start losing interest in school. They start losing interest in relationships. They start losing interest in fitness and well-being. It depletes their life.
Andrew Huberman
The most loving women are the women who will test you the most. She wants you to be your fullest, most magnificent self. She won’t settle for anything less.
David Deida
One of the absolutely pathologic situations for any animal or human is to be able to access repeated dopamine surges without effort or any sort of adaptive action pursuit.
Andrew Huberman
To love is to will the good of the other.
St. Aquinas
Love is silence. Lust is a roar. Love is a sacrifice. Lust always wants more. Love is giving. Lust only takes. Love is a mending of hearts. Lust only breaks.
Sebastian Temple
We sense that the human body is a precious thing, worthy of our reverence. It is not a tool, not an object of consumption like a steak or a keg of beer, not an animate provider of pleasure. It is the outward expression of a profound mystery, that of another human being.
Anthony Esolen
But my issue was and is with pornography it changes the way you think about people. People become body parts–things to be used, rather than people to be loved.
Terry Crews
The Second Law describes the way all pornographic stimuli lose their erotic charge over time, meaning users of porn will over time become desensitized to erotic stimuli. One important consequence of this is that even someone who started out feeling excited by lingerie catalogues will, if given unfettered access to porn, find himself pursuing ever more baroque, extreme and degrading content as the law of fap entropy numbs him to previously exciting imagery.
Mary Harrington
Sex is a strategy we use to meet our psychological needs and not a need itself… How do we know this? Because there is no evidence that celibacy or asexuality is actually physically or psychologically unhealthy. You don’t die from not having enough sex. In fact, there are many health risks because of sex. One could even argue that there are psychological and health benefits from not having sex.
Mark Manson
There’s a general feeling, isn’t there, in your core, if you look at pornography, that this isn’t the best thing for me to do.
Russell Brand
You violate your conscience man, you will pay—that’s hell.
Jordan Peterson
Book II: Strategies & Tools to Defeat Lust
Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
Sun Tzu
But what you have to realize is a part of who you believe you are, a part of your identity is attached to your compulsive and addictive behavior with pornography. So, if you don’t change yourself first—if you don’t start from the bottom up and change who you are and who you are becoming, then the quitting aspect is never going to be sustainable.
Frank Rich
People will do crazy things for causes they believe in, but for yourself you will only go so far. If my kid’s in trouble, I’ll run through a wall of fire, wouldn’t think twice about it. And that’s step number one, you have to have a vision for your future that inspires you.
Jordan Belfort
There is no favorable wind for the sailor who doesn’t know where to go.
Seneca
Often, what people have to do to get themselves out of an addictive process is to find something better to do to replace it… It can be personal. Maybe you want to have a relationship. You want to get married. You want to have kids. You want to have a career that’s meaningful. You want to have a life. You want to have an Abrahamic adventure and be the “father of nations”… And so I think part of [the solution] is to set your sights high, and make a plan, and figure out who you could be, and see if obsessive utilization of smartphone fits into that vision of nobility.
Jordan Peterson
When men go through this process, popularly called “reboot,” they experience a huge number of positive side effects that go beyond just the realm of sexual health. They become stronger, more disciplined, more focused. They reconnect with a vitality in life. They gain strength that then enables them to go on and do other, more positive things. And it seems like once a man is able to navigate the field of porn–be able to quit porn–he’s able to navigate these other vices, these other issues, and develop a lifestyle that can really help him show up as the man he wants to be.
Mark Queppet
On one side of accountability is courage, on the other is freedom.
Jean Hamilton-Ford
When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.
James Clear
The best way to use porn filters is part of a comprehensive approach to ending your behavior with porn and masturbation. They aren’t a waste of time, when you know that they’re not the true solution to your problem. They are simply a deterrence—a short-term deterrence.
J.K. Emezi
Obviously, as I continued to go along and get further into freedom, a level of clarity came to my mind. It was like I was seeing with new eyes. It was really because I had that accountability in place that I was able to get to that point of wanting to keep the freedom and never wanting to go back.
Brandon
For me, what made the biggest difference was opening up to someone that I really loved and trusted.
Larry Wheels
Well, what happened is popular culture, TV, social media, the movies, have given you the impression that whenever people have sexual urges, they do something about it.
J.K. Emezi
One of the very basic beliefs as a human being is that you don’t have to act on your sexual urges. You’re not going to die. You’re not going to lose your mind. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. Your body is going to react. Your mind is going to react, but after a while, it realizes that, “Oh, it’s not the end of the world. I’m going to be okay. And this is going to pass.”
J.K. Emezi
Every battle is won before it is fought.
Sun Tzu
Generally, the idea is that proactivity (a strong offensive action) instead of a passive attitude will preoccupy the opposition and ultimately hinder its ability to mount an opposing counterattack, leading to a strategic advantage.
Wikipedia
People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time—even when hard at work.
Marcus Aurelius
I hear guys say all the time, “Oh, I have a really hard time being consistent.” I’m like, “Bro, if that was true, you would not have an addiction. The whole premise of an addiction is consistently engaging in a behavior. You have proven that you actually can be consistent.”
Sathiya Sam
Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?
Lao Tzu
Meditation is self-therapy. It’s just that instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you, you’re listening to yourself.
Naval Ravikant
It makes sense when you think about somebody that is struggling with porn addiction. They’re overstimulated. They’re overconsuming. Their day is either social media, pornography, work, this, that–they’re always intaking, intake, input, input, consume, consume, consume. So, in fact, if you can just learn to slow down and literally do nothing, to sit there and be present with your own thoughts… it will help you quit porn.
Frank Rich
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal
Thankfulness is the opposite of lust because the thankful heart has stopped prowling around for everything it doesn’t have and is overwhelmed with appreciation for all the good things it already possesses.
Heath Lambert
One of the fastest ways for us to rewire those neural pathways, to reset that dopamine response. . . is the practice of daily gratitude. What ends up happening when you show or express gratitude on a daily basis, that reward center, that pleasure center, that dopamine response–it fires in the same exact way as it does when you’re getting that external stimulus.
Frank Rich
It’s hard to have an impure thought when you are in the presence of the pure one [God]. . . For me, keeping me pure is meeting with the pure one every day.
Robert Morris
When you are in the presence of God, it is easier to do right than to do wrong.
Steve Gallagher
You live in one of the most lustful and exposed ages in history. Not because men have gotten worse, but because the opportunities have gotten greater. The internet, media—everything. So you’re bombarded by every sort of image and every sort of lustful thing.
Paul Washer
My freedom didn’t come from getting rid of porn, even though that was a good thing, but it came from learning how to handle rejection.
Jason Mahr
Addiction is an attempt to escape suffering temporarily.
Gabor Mate
Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.
Richard Foster
You leave me alone for a day, it’ll be like the happiest day I’ve had in a while. And that is a superpower that I think everybody can obtain.
Naval Ravikant
When the iPhone came along, boredom was dead. I would never be bored again. And it’s a disease. It’s actually the road to misery.
Naval Ravikant
Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
Mahatma Gandhi
The best way to think of willpower is not as some shapeless behavioral trait but as a sort of psychic muscle, one that can atrophy or grow stronger depending on how it’s used.
Jeffrey Kluger
Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience.
Gabor Mate
Fasting is completely different from starvation in one crucial way: control. Starvation is the involuntary abstention from eating… Fasting, on the other hand, is the voluntary abstention from eating for spiritual, health, or other reasons. Food is readily available, but you choose not to eat it. No matter what your reason for abstaining, the fact that fasting is voluntary is a critical distinction.
Jason Fung
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Oliver GoldsmithIf you just relapsed, listen up. Stop feeling shameful. It makes you want to do one thing: isolate. Studies show that when you isolate, you become extremely stressed out. That stress builds and builds and makes you want to do one thing again, go and relapse. Relapse, shame, isolation, stress, relapse, all the way to your inevitable hell.
Josh Hudson
You are only as strong as you are honest.
Craig Groeschel
I learned early on in my faith that I healed as I revealed.
Kirk Franklin
We confess to God for forgiveness, but James says we confess to people for healing.
Craig Groeschel
Why resist a temptation in the future if you have the power to eliminate it today?
Craig Groeschel
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
Henry Ford
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
C.S. Lewis
Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end.
Denis Waitley
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston Churchill
The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.
Sun Tzu
In advanced cases, pride shows up as the belief that the ordinary rules of life don’t apply to a person as great as me… Paul speaks to this as well: “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.”
Jacob Hudgins
Humility only works when we practice it. Praising humility, studying it, and decrying the lack of it are not the same as doing.
Jacob Hudgins
It is impossible to look at porn and be humble. Because this is true, it gives us a key weapon in the fight against porn.
Heath Lambert
Sex desire is the most powerful of human desires. When driven by this desire, men develop keenness of imagination, courage, will-power, persistence, and creative ability unknown to them at other times. So strong and impelling is the desire for sexual contact that men freely run the risk of life and reputation to indulge it. When harnessed, and redirected along other lines, this motivating force maintains all of its attributes of keenness of imagination, courage, etc., which may be used as powerful creative forces in literature, art, or in any other profession or calling, including, of course, the accumulation of riches.
Napoleon Hill
It’s not stress that kills us, it’s our reaction to it.”
Hans Selye
Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.
Naval Ravikant
One of the biggest things these scientists found to get your brain to function like the brains of monks who have been meditating for 20 years… It was this one thing: radical forgiveness.
Vishen Lakhiani
No one can act beyond their current level of consciousness.
Eckhart Tolle
It is okay that you have made mistakes. Life didn’t come with instructions.
Viking Proverb
I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship… We are hard-wired to connect with others. It’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.
Brene Brown
As we spend time with Abba, He will cut away places of fear and anxiety, which become idols that demand our worship. Abba challenges us to open our hearts and minds to His, removing these hindrances so He can minister healing to our past brokenness.
Matthew Stevenson
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx
When angry, count to 10 before you speak. If very angry, a hundred.
Thomas Jefferson
If we keep experiencing an old thing in a new context, it gets reoriented to the new context.“
Brian Powell
You know you cannot get rats addicted to cocaine if they live in their natural environments. You can only get rats addicted to cocaine if they’re isolated rats in a cage. They won’t bar press for cocaine in the natural environment, and it’s because they have alternative sources of dopaminergic gratification. That’s very interesting.
Jordan Peterson
All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision.
James Clear
Everybody’s life gets better when they quit this stuff. Every single time. I’ve never seen an exception where someone fully quit this and their life got worse
Mark Queppet
Book III: Appendix of Articles on Emotional Healing
Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is ‘slow’ yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love.
Kosuke Koyama
Corrie Ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy… Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul.
John Mark Comer
Hurry is not of the devil. Hurry is the devil.
Carl Jung
New insight brings new feeling.
Lewis Smedes
If your thoughts were laid bare here tonight, every one of them, you would all run out of here in shame.
Paul Washer
To honor our parents means to thank them for the life they have given us, to accept and take responsibility for what they were not able to give, to live a worthy life, and to honor their presence in our hearts.
Popular Wisdom
Trauma is a psychic wound that hardens you psychologically that then interferes with your ability to grow and develop. It pains you and now you’re acting out of pain… Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.
Gabor Mate
Hope is like the sun, which, as we journey toward it, casts the shadow of our burden behind us.
Samuel Smiles