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Reintegrative Therapy (with Dr. Joseph Nicolosi Jr.)

September 25, 2023 Drew Boa
Reintegrative Therapy (with Dr. Joseph Nicolosi Jr.)
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Husband Material
Reintegrative Therapy (with Dr. Joseph Nicolosi Jr.)
Sep 25, 2023
Drew Boa

What is reintegrative therapy? Dr. Joseph Nicolosi Jr. explains his approach to treating trauma and how it can help men outgrow porn. Joseph also shares insights about sexual attraction, sexual development, euphoric recall, and the importance of being able to choose your own values and goals.

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi Jr. is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, researcher, and clinical director at The Breakthrough Clinic in Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in 2009 from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology.

Joseph is the president of the Reintegrative Therapy Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in which trauma treatment is the goal, and sexual attraction change is often the byproduct. He is the author of multiple peer-reviewed, published articles on Reintegrative Therapy.

To participate in Joseph's new research study on memory recall and sexual arousal, email losangelesresearchcenter@gmail.com. Find out more information here.

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Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

What is reintegrative therapy? Dr. Joseph Nicolosi Jr. explains his approach to treating trauma and how it can help men outgrow porn. Joseph also shares insights about sexual attraction, sexual development, euphoric recall, and the importance of being able to choose your own values and goals.

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi Jr. is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, researcher, and clinical director at The Breakthrough Clinic in Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in 2009 from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology.

Joseph is the president of the Reintegrative Therapy Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in which trauma treatment is the goal, and sexual attraction change is often the byproduct. He is the author of multiple peer-reviewed, published articles on Reintegrative Therapy.

To participate in Joseph's new research study on memory recall and sexual arousal, email losangelesresearchcenter@gmail.com. Find out more information here.

Take the Husband Material Journey...

Thanks for listening!

***
HMA is open! Join now at joinHMA.com
The doors will close on Sunday, July 21.
***

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Husband Material podcast, where we help Christian men outgrow porn. Why? So you can change your brain, heal your heart and save your relationship. My name is Drew Boa and I'm here to show you how let's go. Hey man, thank you so much for listening to this interview with Dr Joseph Nicolosi Jr.

Speaker 1:

It is a very sensitive topic to talk about reintegrative therapy, sexual attraction and sexual development, healing trauma and, ultimately, some interesting ways to decrease the pull of certain types of pornography and help you outgrow porn. That's what we're about here at Husband Material. We talk about euphoric recall and decreasing the sexual arousal of certain sexual memories. This can be helpful in outgrowing porn and stripping porn of its seductive power. So I wanted to make this conversation available, even though it is a redemptive risk for me, because some of the things said in this episode are controversial and, I'll be honest, part of me is scared to publish this episode because I've been warned that it will bring greater scrutiny and controversy and criticism. So this is not an endorsement of reintegrative therapy. This is a conversation that I believe you guys deserve to hear because it could help you continue to get free and heal and outgrow porn.

Speaker 1:

Enjoy the episode. Welcome to Husband Material. Today I'm having a conversation with Dr Joseph Nicolosi Jr, founder of reintegrative therapy. Welcome to Husband Material. Thanks for having me, joseph. What do people need to know about you and your story?

Speaker 2:

Wow About me and my story. I'm a clinical psychologist. I help people where they're at, and I'm interested in helping men and women, but usually ends up being men living in a to live in accordance with their values, and that's a passion of mine and this is what I do.

Speaker 1:

Joseph, how did you get into this work?

Speaker 2:

My father was a clinical psychologist and I didn't feel like I would go into his field because it would just be following after him and I just kind of wrote it off. But I think what shifted was for me, in my early 20s, meeting people who had gone through this kind of journey and seeing the shift in their life. I think that was really powerful. That was the first step for me and I think my my interest in people and how they work and I think a big turning point for me was seeing that there were in some way politicians and activists who wanted to take away the rights of these individuals from choosing their own path. That really was powerful for me.

Speaker 2:

I think on a personal level, that affected me. I think I aligned myself and empathized with the clients who said no, I want to live in accordance with my own values and I don't want any politician or any activist or anybody telling me what my therapy goals should be and to have the right to change my goals at any time. I feel like I identified and aligned myself with these people and that motivated me in a different way not a professional way, but I think it was by empathizing that. It kind of lit a fire in me. Yeah, so I've probably little steps along the way.

Speaker 1:

What led you to create this particular model of reintegrative therapy?

Speaker 2:

Seeing EMDR at work was pretty powerful, seeing that a person would have a shame belief and then we do a set of eye movements and then the shame belief didn't feel true anymore. It was like I initially saw EMDR, which, in case people don't know, eye movement desensitization, reprocessing it's a therapy with that involves part of it, not even all of it. Part of it involves bilateral eye movements. You think of a traumatic memory. You move your eyes in a certain pattern and then over time that memory is not as disturbing. That's an oversimplification, but that's the basic element of what that is of EMDR. And so I was doing this with some of my clients and just seeing shifts that the very same memory that activated shame would not activate shame within a few minutes. That was pretty incredible.

Speaker 1:

Now your father, joseph Nicolosi Sr, was the founder of Reparative Therapy, that's right. And now you have founded this new approach reintegrative therapy. What are some of the differences?

Speaker 2:

People ask me that a lot the differences and it's hard, without him here, to know exactly what he would say. I can just speak for myself, I can just represent myself and just say that, when it comes to reintegrative therapy, this is a therapy in which we treat traumatic memories and we help individuals have something called a secure attachment style, and as we do that, what we see as a byproduct is that sexual attractions often shift, which is, I'm sure, something that we'll talk about later on today. But the new data, the new published data that has come out and is going to continue to come out over the next few years, is showing the effect of this.

Speaker 1:

So the goal is healing from traumatic memories and forming secure attachment, and what you're saying is that this can sometimes result in a shift in sexual attraction or sexual arousal. That's right To me. It kind of seems like that would attract a lot of people who are really more interested in just shifting their arousal.

Speaker 2:

Yes, that's true and that would draw a lot of people. However, what we don't shy away from is that we say openly and without any shame that oftentimes in this process, when people do this, they notice shifts in their same-sex attractions, and we're not going to hide that. And there's new published data showing that these individuals see and report the shifts in their sexual attractions. And just to be clear, when we're talking about changing sexual attractions, I just want to get the vocabulary straight before we go further. We're not talking about flipping a light switch. We're talking about rotating a light dimmer. We're talking about varying degrees of change, of gradual change. It's different for every single person.

Speaker 1:

While this is mostly part of the conversation on same-sex attraction and LGBTQ issues, would you say that this same process could work for other people?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, absolutely. We believe that everybody has the right to walk away from sexual practices that don't work for them and to have support to do so.

Speaker 1:

It seems like people who decide I want to try to remove or replace my sexual arousal are consistently finding that it just doesn't work that way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's what they often see. So let me kind of start at the beginning. We have a thousand or more men who have come here with same-sex attractions. It's predominantly men and they report a very similar childhood background. I mean, men fly in from different countries, we see different cultural backgrounds and different ages, men in their 70s, a guy who I just saw yesterday who's 22 years old. But there are commonalities that these guys we can kind of distill in what they tell me and other therapists at my clinic. So let me give you the basic in a nutshell.

Speaker 2:

It's understood that kids have different developmental stages, that they go through Right, so you have a when kids are of different ages. You can see that pretty clearly. A seven-year-old and a three-year-old are going through different things. So there are different stages of development. It is thought that the stages of development for boys and girls are basically identical Up until about two and a half years of age. This is the traditional thinking about this that the boy at this point around two and a half has an additional developmental task that the girl doesn't have, which is to disidentify from the mother and identify with the father.

Speaker 2:

Okay, well, many clients who come to me describe very similar childhood backgrounds, of a distant father who could be critical, a mother who can be higher anxiety sometimes intrusive, and the client himself is temperamentally sensitive. Oftentimes if there's an older brother, who's just a few years older, it's usually a feared, hostile relationship with that brother who happens one step older. If there's three brothers, it's usually just above the client's age a feared, hostile relationship. And so these factors together, according to what my clients told me, these factors make it harder for that boy to shift into that gender identity of a secure, masculine gender identity. And these are the childhood backgrounds that they say that they have and that those dynamics later on set these boys up for additional challenges later in life.

Speaker 2:

So these guys often report having difficulty getting male attention, affection and approval. But they oftentimes get much more female attention, affection, approval and around early adolescence 13, 14, 15, right around there that's where they start to notice these feelings toward other guys and that usually isn't immediately sexual. It's usually like a jolt or an intrigue toward a guy. It's usually a guy who is confident, who's relaxed in himself. Oftentimes they describe a sense of athleticism in these guys and my clients will have like a jolt that over a couple of years period, like two, three years, eventually become sexualized.

Speaker 2:

And the clients will often say I don't know what to do with these feelings. I'll try to repress them, I'll try to ignore them, I'll try to make myself and conjure up feelings make myself attracted to girls, and yet these reactions in me don't go away. And we live in a culture that says oh, if you have that reaction, that must mean you are gay. And the gay label often brings relief to many people, to many of these guys like oh, there's a name for what I'm dealing with, okay, good, the community. The problem with the label, however, is it effectively severs the guy from being a regular guy. Oh, now I'm a different type of guy, now I'm sealed with this label around me. And it often reinforces the boy's notion that he really is different from other guys, he's a different type of guy, and that ends up being a problem. And so many of my clients will often describe to me that they are attracted to features in other men that they themselves feel like they are lacking in themselves, and that ends up getting eroticized. And these men will say look, this doesn't work for me, and this is what I'm about to say is true for men and women. Actually, they'll usually describe three motivations for why they would say these feelings do not work for me. And, by the way, these motivations I never see depicted anywhere in the media. Like ever, it's as if these people and their motivations and their values don't even exist. But these are the three.

Speaker 2:

Many of my clients were sexually abused when they were young, resulting in conflict, confusion and unwanted same-sex attractions that they wish to resolve as adults. Many of them are religious, some of them are many of Christian, but I get a lot of Jewish and a lot of Muslim clients as well. Some of them aren't even a particular Western religion. I worked with someone yesterday who is of an Eastern cultural background but for him and his religious beliefs, he believes that he was created for heterosexuality. So we have a religion, or we might call a worldview.

Speaker 2:

And then the last is a practical application. Some guys aren't religious, they weren't sexually abused, but they say this is not for me. So I'm here just north of LA. So we have a lot of guys who come in from West Hollywood who say you know what? I came out 10 years ago and it's not what I want. I wanna try something different.

Speaker 2:

Or many men who are married, they're in a heterosexual marriage. I get a lot of men like this. They're in a heterosexual marriage and they do love their wives, but they have some same-sex attractions that come and go at different times in their life and they say this is not for me. My, by the way, it could be toward a woman, it doesn't matter, I want my attractions to be toward my wife and I would call that not really practical. That would be a practical application, not necessarily religious and not necessarily resulting from childhood sexual abuse. So I believe that these three reasons should be honored and if a person wants to pursue therapy to resolve unwanted attractions of any kind, who are we to stop them and deny them their freedom to pick their own goals?

Speaker 1:

And this is the basis of the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice right.

Speaker 2:

Yes, that's right. It's an organization that works with this organization as well.

Speaker 1:

So I'm really interested in this narrative, which I've definitely heard before, where guys have a similar set of childhood experiences. At the same time, I realize that I myself have had many of those experiences distant father, overbearing mother, sexual abuse and yuckiness in my family and I never developed same-sex attraction. Sometimes I feel like, well, I had the perfect setup for that, and yet my unwanted sexual attraction was actually toward a variation of girls and women. I mean, there are infinite varieties and I find it helpful to look at these as contributors rather than a cause.

Speaker 2:

Exactly exactly Right. So there's difference between a determinant and a contributor. There are certain things that are determinants in nature. There's a specific gene. If you have that gene, you will have this eye color period. That's a determinant. But in this case we're talking about contributors, and the more contributors we add to a given child situation, it might have an impact, and there's research on this. This is being hotly debated right now, but that may be increasing the probability that the boy will have these attractions later on.

Speaker 1:

And that sexual development story can go in many different directions. I often find that whatever attraction we have is symbolizing something.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, exactly right. That's the key, right there. It doesn't matter if a person's unwanted attractions are toward a man or a woman. It's what does this person represent to me? What do they represent? Who do they remind me of? And something left over from my life, do they remind me of something about myself that I don't like? So once a person can see, oh, it's not about that person, it's about what they represent to me, that is powerful. Then that's the beginning of opening the doorway out of any given sexually compulsive behavior.

Speaker 1:

That's right. So what is reintegrative therapy?

Speaker 2:

So in reintegrative therapy we use trauma treatment to help clients. We have videos online on reintegrativetherapycom People can watch. Actually, we'll watch what it. You know these, what the process is, and as we do this we see that the sexual attraction shift on their own, and every few years we publish a new study. So two studies have come out.

Speaker 1:

There's a couple more of the next few years that we hope to have on the way, and you're doing a new study right now that I actually got to participate in and it was quite remarkable for me personally. It's paid research on memory recall and sexual arousal. What's that about?

Speaker 2:

Thank you for bringing that up, because for a little while longer we're still going to be taking more participants. And people get paid. It's not much, it's 16 bucks. So you know a burger and a Coke. If an individual has two memories that are arousing that they'd like to no longer be arousing it doesn't matter if they have same sex attractions or opposite. Some guys have bisexual, one's toward a man, one's toward a woman If you have two memories that are arousing that you'd like to no longer be arousing, then you may be a candidate for this and we are testing an eight minute intervention.

Speaker 2:

It's very quick. You do it over Zoom. You don't even need to tell me the details of the memory. If you don't want to, you can give me a keyword, like a man not long ago said quiet, secret place. That's all you want me to know. Quiet, secret place. Okay, fine, whatever that means. And we do this technique and then we measure the arousal before and after. So yeah, we're definitely still taking participants. If someone would like to participate, just email Los Angeles Research Center at gmailcom Los Angeles Research Center at gmailcom and just say, hey, I'm interested and we can take care of them from there.

Speaker 1:

And I'll put the link to that in the show notes and the description for this. My personal experience was quite profound. I noticed a big shift in both memories that we worked through, and I'm really curious to find out what the results of this research will be.

Speaker 2:

Me too, I'm excited, but as a researcher it's like at this point I just have to wait and see what happens. But I think it is exciting, and there's a lot of guys saying exactly what you just said.

Speaker 1:

And this relates to freedom from porn, because so much of our pull toward porn is the memory of it and the arousal of it.

Speaker 2:

In general, there's something called euphoric recall and a person will sometimes feel compelled to reenact a sexual behavior from their past.

Speaker 2:

We often see this with individuals who were sexually abused when they were young, when the sexual abuse was enacted from a trusted caregiver, meaning that there was a caregiver who gave the child some emotional need. The child needed affection or touch or something like that, but eventually that caregiver paired that feeling with sex. And now the client or participant has this euphoric link and they say this doesn't work for me, this is not what I want. I'm 25 years old and I'm still kind of reenacting this stuff. So that would be what's something called euphoric recall that many people have and they feel driven, compelled to reenact this, and what ends up happening in their adult life is they end up with sexual behaviors that are self-defeating, self-destructive and maladaptive. The person says I don't want this, it goes against my values, it's jeopardizing my work, I'm using porn at work. There's something that's actually defeating for me, and yet I feel irresistibly drawn toward it, and that's often because of euphoric recall.

Speaker 1:

Makes a lot of sense and it's based on trauma. We might call it trauma sexuality.

Speaker 2:

We have all these forms of sexuality. Why isn't someone talked about that? I mean, that's exactly right, that's totally right.

Speaker 1:

And reintegrative therapy is a trauma treatment. What are some examples of how you treat the trauma?

Speaker 2:

And you want to again, I'm going to go. If you want to go in depth and do a deep dive, go to reintegrativetherapycom. We have the step-by-step methods and we have the video showing this. But people, we start with a behavior. In fact, we even did a study on binge eating disorder. We use the same thing. That's often. People had euphoric recall for binge eating.

Speaker 2:

So we start basically with the behavior that feels, like I mentioned before, self-defeating, self-destructive and yet irresistible. I can't stop it. Get into that, get into the feeling, feel the feeling really intensely. And once you have that really intense and you really feel it, then imagine going outside yourself and looking in your own eyes and look deeper, deeper to deeper. What do you notice?

Speaker 2:

And the therapist, who's trained in this will can help the client, guide the client, go into deeper feelings. Whatever feelings they see the deepest, you know, like a guy yesterday it was a compulsive pornography. He's married, he loves his wife, but he keeps getting drawn towards these images of other women and when he looked in his own eyes it was like a sadness. It was a helpless, a helpless quality of sadness and that led us back to several memories and we reprocessed the memories. There are several ways a person can reprocess them. Emdr is a good one.

Speaker 2:

Mindful self-compassion is a technique that's actually been around for probably at least a thousand years, going back to the Buddhist scholastic tradition, the ancient Buddhist scholastic tradition. There are many ways that people have resolved trauma. In the book of Job 2,500 years ago it was you know we see depictions of treating deep, intense traumatic pain and sitting with and being with a person in their presence while they're grieving. So there are a variety of methods, some cutting edge, some ancient, and, as we see the resolution of the traumatic memories, low and behold, that tub of ice cream doesn't feel so compelling, or that pornographic fantasy. The client goes. I can kind of see what this is about now, and now I see it kind of differently and it's lost some of that quality.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that makes it a lot easier to leave that particular porn behind. Exactly, can you give me a case of somebody who has been struggling with porn coming in for reintegrative therapy? What happens next?

Speaker 2:

Well, we first assess the person using a variety of psychological assessments. So we use a computerized system to track them Anxiety, depression, compulsive sexual behavior, ocd that's a huge driving factor that people don't talk about. That is often at play with compulsive behaviors. There's a lot of overlap with that and we track them on the computer and then we do some treatment interventions and eventually we go back to the same assessments and we track them over time. We have the computer, track it out and we share that with our clients. We show them okay, you're getting better in depression, not so much in social anxiety, you're doing better in this area, and so that helps us to adjust what the treatment interventions are that we're using, and we try to do it in a collaborative way with the client. So we're all looking at it together. We're looking at the same scores together. So in some sense it's different for each person. Oftentimes, what we want to help the client to do is, if there is a compulsive sexual behavior, we want to help them, and we talked about this earlier in this interview. We want to help them understand what does that person represent to you? What is it about them? What is it about that person's attitude? Maybe that's the hook that really draws you in. And there's a person in the image that has an attitude and that attitude really keys into something in you, a developmental deficit in you that you feel like is missing, and that's why it's so compulsive, that's why you can't get that image or video out of your mind. That can be something that's very helpful to the client to become aware of. And then where else can you get that need met in a healthy way? Are there other avenues you can get this and helping the client to explore?

Speaker 2:

Someone once said to me that the hallmark of maturity is taking responsibility for your needs and your life. The hallmark of maturity is taking responsibility for your needs and your life. And when an individual is addicted to pornography, doesn't matter if it's same sex or opposite sex, that's irrelevant. When they're addicted to it, there's often some need that they are not going out in the world and just getting met. So here's a clear example A man who is really addicted to fantasies in which he felt very powerful. He's very powerful and he's very in control, but if you look at the rest of his life, he's out of control, he's helpless, he's not speaking up for himself, but he could always shift gears into that fantasy and now he's really strong and really powerful. So part of therapy is exploring and work on that euphoric recall.

Speaker 2:

But also, where can you get those needs met in your life? Go run some hills, go for a jog, go connect with other men. Men's groups are very, very important. Again, this is not about if it's same sex or opposite. Connecting with other people, being your authentic self and as the man makes those shifts in other areas of his life, oftentimes the compensatory behaviors, the addictive behaviors that we're attempting to counterbalance for these deficits in the man's life. Now we start to write the ship a little bit and that's powerful. And again we're talking about methods of helping individuals that don't involve drugs. At no point in this interview have you or I talked about giving people pills. They're relational resources and, for many people, spiritual resources that are helpful to them to find and regain balance in their life, and those are avenues that people find helpful and they're often not aware of.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. That resonates so much with me and my story. Having fantasized about being in power and then finding empowerment in my real life rather than a fantasy world, this seems common to everyone. It's not just for one segment of who's attracted to what I feel like. This journey of sexual development is for everyone, and we all have unwanted sexual attraction of some kind or another. Most of us are not really open to talking about it.

Speaker 2:

That's right. And let me add to this something else. In some senses it's harder, even harder, for people with same-sex attractions, because it's like, where am I going to go? In very conservative venues, it's like I'm going to be the odd man out. But also in the gay community, I'm not allowed to say at some point you know what? I don't want these attractions.

Speaker 2:

In healthy communities, people are free to come and go as they choose, but it's unhealthy when communities welcome people in but then deny those same individuals from having the right to leave. And we do see this oftentimes in the LGBT movement, and this is a more recent phenomenon where this has really been growing. But there is a sense that you can't do this. If you do, you're just denying who you really are, you're lying to yourself and it's just going to result in failure. So don't even try. Those messages are very discouraging for these individuals and they get the sense that they have no other options. So, in effect, other people are telling them what their future has to be, and I think the scientific data shows that's not true. Many people's sexual attraction change over the course of their lives, and that's information that everyone should have access to.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I agree with that. I love how you're talking about sexual development. For me, having married my wife in my twenties, for me to still be attracted to her and have a sex life with her long term, I'm going to need to be attracted to a very different body. When we are in our fifties and sixties, my arousal will need to shift. It will need to grow, not in the sense of being turned off and on like a light switch, but in the sense of maturing.

Speaker 2:

That's right, that's exactly right. So the shift that you're bringing, a good connection here, that the shifts are often just a natural part of maturing and that's a part that's built in to any form of monogamy. That's built in if you want a stable, secure relationship.

Speaker 1:

That's something that both partners have to come to terms with, that there will be shifts and to embrace those shifts and that's okay, my specific sexual fetish for braces was very developmentally tied to being a teenager and in my early 20s I was like why am I still attracted to these teenage girls? Well, it was a part of me that was still stuck in that stage really needed to grow up, and that's just one example of how this can happen. I find that we're really not all that different in the end, that's right.

Speaker 2:

This is it. As we're treating trauma, as we're helping people with developing secure attachment patterns, they see, and sexual addictions, if those are there, we see these shifts happening on their own, as a byproduct, and that's a really important distinction that has to be made.

Speaker 1:

It sounds to me like you encourage people to not focus on trying to shift the attraction, but on healing, growing and doing the work and then just seeing what happens.

Speaker 2:

That's right. That's exactly right. That's right. Let the process, trust the process and see what happens. Let whatever happens happen, without trying to white-knuckle or trying to have a preconceived goal that you're trying to force yourself into. In terms of their specific behavioral, sexual behavioral patterns, doing the deeper work is more important and it's putting our emphasis on where the work really belongs.

Speaker 1:

Joseph, I'm sure that you receive a lot of criticism and a lot of scrutiny for some of your work. What are some of the most common objections?

Speaker 2:

Usually it would be something along the lines of there's no evidence that this works or you're just trying to make people something that they're not. And there's plenty of evidence. Go to reintegratedtherapycom. Click on science and you'll get a bunch of different studies that talked about this. But there is a lot of evidence that dealing with trauma, for example, can shift sexual attractions as a byproduct.

Speaker 2:

Okay, here's something that I do here and this is in the news. People will maybe able to relate to seeing an article or something of this sort, but it's so-called conversion therapy bans which are going across the United States right now and it's highly debated, and we believe that everybody should be free to find therapy and support to help them achieve their desired goals and outcomes. Everybody should be free to live a life consistent with their values and nobody, and no politician should interfere with that. If an individual wants to live in accordance with his values, that's that individual's choice. As long as we have freely consenting adults who say there is any kind of sexual behavior, that doesn't work for me. We believe those people should be supported. They deserve to be understood and listened to, and we believe they should have access to methods that are helpful.

Speaker 1:

When I first thought about interviewing you, I was scared that I might lose membership in a professional organization. So I reached out to them and they actually told me hey, it's okay if you interview this guy, just be warned. Be warned that you will probably receive a lot of scrutiny, that some other professionals have been attacked and maligned and they've been trolled and hate mailed. So I do realize there's a lot of risk with this.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I understand and appreciate and respect your willingness to have this conversation and the fact that there are people who give warnings hey, don't have that person on your show, don't have that topic. About that discussion, there's this population. You know that, don't discuss that population. It's like it's a risk if you even discuss it. That says a lot. It says a lot about the times we live in. It says a lot about the fear that's in this field about appearing like a bad person and I think it says something about you that you're willing to press ahead and have a possibly unpopular conversation about a needed topic and that you're willing to go there. Anyway, I respect that about you, so thank you.

Speaker 1:

Joseph, yeah, we want to help men outgrow porn, and what I often tell people is do what works. It doesn't have to be one right way necessarily, and if reintegrative therapy can help people get free from porn, then I'm excited to let people know about it. Joseph, what is your favorite thing about freedom from porn?

Speaker 2:

The joy of being in alignment with our values, I think, is more important. That's why it's reintegrative. It's like I'm integrated with myself and it's not integrative. It's reintegrative, meaning when we came into the world, we were already integrated. When a child comes into the world, that child just starts screaming. These are my needs, this is what I want. There's no problem with that. But something happens along the way to all of us that can cause some difficulty with that. And so I think the joy of being integrated in oneself, these are my values, these are my attractions, these are my relational patterns, this is where my connections are. That's a greater joy than a more lasting joy, than anything that pornography can bring.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so I'm including the link to this research study. If you want to participate, you can email Los Angeles Research Center at gmailcom. Find out more about Joseph and what he's doing in the show notes, Joseph, thank you so much.

Speaker 2:

Drude, thank you, I really appreciate it and I'm glad we got to connect. It's an honor to be on your show, thank you.

Speaker 1:

You're so welcome, gentlemen. Always remember you are God's beloved Son In you. He is well-pleased.

Joseph's Story
What is Reintegrative Therapy?

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