Speaker 1: 0:01

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 for listening to the first episode of Husband Material, where someone else interviewed me. Dr Eddie Caparucci, creator of the Inner Child Model and author of Going Deeper, interviewed me about my new book, outgrow Porn, which you can get now at outgrowporncom. Enjoy the episode.

Speaker 2: 0:37

I am so excited to be here today with one of my best friends and my colleague, drew Boa. My best friends and my colleague Drew Boa Drew has given me the opportunity to interview him about his new book Outgrown Porn right. Outgrown Porn Finding Lasting Freedom Without Fighting an Exhausting Battle. You know, drew, it is an exhausting battle for so many people who try to fight pornography.

Speaker 1: 1:06

Yeah, it's so frustrating and exhausting because the more you resist sexual thoughts and feelings, the stronger they get.

Speaker 2: 1:14

It may become overwhelming, and especially when you can't, you know, get them under control, which is really part of the struggle at the beginning for many of it. But I want to start out. I want to ask you the most basic question what led you to write a book?

Speaker 1: 1:34

It came from my own story of finding now 10 years of freedom from internet porn and helping other guys finding out what works, what resonates, reading so many books like your book and going through trainings and putting it all together in something that would be more practical and relatable for people while still being really deep and, I think, powerful too.

Speaker 2: 2:00

Yeah, and it is powerful. It's a very powerful book. You did a great job because, let's face it, there are a lot of books out there on the market. I put way too many out there myself. How do you think this book that you have written, how is it different from others that are out there?

Speaker 1: 2:20

Well, it's the exact opposite of a lot of books that are based on purity culture, so, for example, the classic evangelical sexual recovery resource of Every Man's Battle. It's also, I think, different than some of the more clinical books Unwanted by Jay Stringer really going into sexual fantasies. Another big influence was the inner child model, because the book's all about healing the boy to free the man. And then another big one for me was Internal Family Systems, ifs. But there are no IFS books that really talk about sexual parts. Like IFS is so good, but they haven't really applied it to fantasies yet or they haven't really applied it to porn. So I'm trying to bring those things together. And then the other thing is you encouraged me about two years ago to write a book with tools Like what can you actually do? Right, because it's not just about the problem. We want to give people resources to actually solve the problem.

Speaker 2: 3:23

Yeah, I mean, you remember the library I had behind me, you know, hundreds and hundreds of books before we moved. I was so frustrated, so often you read this book and you're going through and you're reading, reading. It's the problem, the problem, the problem, the problem, and it's like, okay, well, hopefully you understand about the depth of this problem and there's no solutions. And it drives me crazy. And that's what I love about your book it's just loaded with the roadmap. It has that roadmap, that guide to lead people to that kind of freedom.

Speaker 1: 3:58

You've been saying for a long time that the road to recovery goes through your childhood, and I'm trying to show what that road looks like. And another big thing is stories of guys who are on this journey who have given me permission to share.

Speaker 2: 4:11

Yeah, there's a lot of good ones that are in there. So you believe that by someone understanding what their sexual fantasies are, that can be a key to overcoming pornography? Can you explain to our viewers how did that help, if I know what my fantasies are?

Speaker 1: 4:28

Yeah, my sexual fetish was always focused on girls and women with braces, so that would be the type of image or video that I would search out on the internet to sexually stimulate myself, and I always thought that was weird and strange, and yet also fascinating and absolutely irresistible. For some reason, I never really understood why it had this magnetic power over me, and when I started to finally see what was underneath that wow, what a difference. I found that there was this middle school Drew who needed my help, and that just changed everything for me, like it was no longer about fighting a battle against that part of me, it was about befriending that part of me.

Speaker 2: 5:17

Understanding it. Okay, yeah, and then you have that understanding of what drove you toward this interest, this fascination in the sexual realm, which, again, that's why you know no, I'm the big, why, guy? Why do I think, feel and act the way I do? And that takes you down that pathway.

Speaker 1: 5:40

For me it felt like that moment in the Wizard of Oz, where Oz the great and powerful looks like this big, scary monster and then they pull back the curtain and they see there's this little old man in there, and so I felt like behind the curtain of this porn that felt so powerful, there was this little boy in there it takes away a lot of the power that the fantasy had before the urge right, right, and that was absolutely essential because in 2014, after a whole year of freedom from porn, I felt like I was back at the beginning, and so it seemed like, no matter how much sobriety I get, it still has power over me, and the goal of this book is not necessarily to guarantee that you'll be sober forever, but that it will lose its power, that it will feel less magical, more manageable yes, and that's what the whole thing is.

Speaker 2: 6:43

It's taking it. You know, I have people say to me constantly like I just want to be cured of this, and it's like, well, I'm sorry, you're talking to the wrong person and I'm not sure anyone that you talk to is going to cure you. We don't get cured. What we do is we learn to manage it. But you can manage it very effectively and you can manage it for the rest of your life, especially if you allow the power that it has to dissipate. And that's the thing I really love about your book. It really kind of shows people how to go about doing that. So you put something else in there that I was so excited to see and that you have an entire chapter devoted to emotional regulation. And you know, I believe emotional regulation is recovery. That's recovery. But why do you think this is such an important topic that you put a whole chapter in there?

Speaker 1: 7:41

Because, as you see on the cover of the book, porn is a pacifier. In other words, it's a way of soothing pain. Yes, it is a problem and also it's the solution that we found when we were kids to the other problems we were facing in our lives. I find that whatever type of porn has power, and whenever I feel triggered or tempted to watch porn, there's some kind of unprocessed pain, there's some unprocessed emotion underneath it that gets sexualized. So if we can process those deeper emotions, we desexualize those feelings, those deeper emotions.

Speaker 2: 8:24

we desexualize those feelings Exactly. But you have to understand what are those issues, what are the pain points that again are subconscious, that lead us to what?

Speaker 1: 8:35

And as men, we're often not taught to figure out how we feel or talk about how we feel, much less actually feel things. To be a man is to toughen up, not necessarily to feel your emotions. So it's exactly right that emotional regulation is recovery, and I wanted to take a lot of the science of polyvagal theory and neuroplasticity and make it easier for people to understand.

Speaker 2: 9:06

And you were very successful in doing that, because I've seen it many times where it's explained polyvagal and it's over a lot of people's heads.

Speaker 2: 9:19

It may not go over your head, may not go over my head, but for many other readers it is what they do. They tune it out, and the problem is that this is such a critical subject. It cannot be afforded to be tuned out. So I really applaud you for that you put in there and I found it very interesting and I never really gave it much thought, and that was this idea of the difference between arousal and being triggered, and because I always thought, well, you're aroused to be triggered. You know why is it important for people to distinguish between the two of them?

Speaker 1: 10:00

Arousal is your body's natural reaction to stimuli. So if I see an attractive person walking down the street, that might be arousing, it might be exciting or interesting, and then I can move on. If that feels not just attractive but obsessive and irresistible and I find myself going back to that person hours later or even days later, okay, there's something that got triggered that is disproportionate to this everyday event. So that can happen sexually, that can happen emotionally. I'm talking with my wife and all of a sudden I shut down and I go completely numb. That's more than just a normal emotional reaction. That's deeper.

Speaker 2: 10:48

Yeah, and it goes back to again our autonomic nervous system. You know, the sympathetic part of that has kicked in, Right.

Speaker 1: 10:58

So when we get charged up, powered up emotionally or sexually, we're being aroused, and when that feels overwhelming or it just causes us to completely dissociate, probably being triggered and in need of more processing and relational support.

Speaker 2: 11:16

What should men do, if anything, about their arousal?

Speaker 1: 11:22

That's a great question. It reminds me of an episode we did on Husband Material last year called it's good to be aroused with sam joelman. You know it's, it's okay. Like, arousal is a gift of god. We can welcome it, we can understand it, ask the why questions and we can appreciate it and say thank you for being here and also manage it as we've talked about.

Speaker 2: 11:49

Because what's again, if I can correct me, being aroused is very different than the being triggered. Okay, because the trigger? Again, there's some sort of underlining emotional driver that is dysfunctional in a way. Yeah, again, being aroused is just part of our nature and the way god designed us yeah, that's really well said.

Speaker 1: 12:19

Being triggered is often a trauma reaction right, exactly, it is a trauma reaction yeah. So if I find myself triggered, that means there's some kind of threat, there's some kind of fear, and lie under the surface here that I need to become aware of.

Speaker 2: 12:36

The thing that's just so confusing or so frustrating is it doesn't feel like a threat. At times when we're triggered like that, that's the last thing it really feels like, but that's because we don't really understand the depth of what's driving that trigger. Amen, yeah, you also wrote something, and it was stop competing against your sexuality, because you're never going to win, and instead collaborate with your sexuality and you're going to get to where you want to go. Now, I think you touched upon this a little bit earlier when we were talking, but what did you mean by this?

Speaker 1: 13:25

Well, first of all, I've experienced that I mean God created our sexuality to be so powerful. It's like the ocean it's beautiful, it's awe-inspiring and it can destroy you, you know. Isn't that true of sex and sexuality? Very, very much so. And it can be fun and enjoyable, Beautiful, beautiful, right, without enough safety or boundaries, like, yeah, it's dangerous too.

Speaker 1: 13:59

So what do we do with the ocean? We have to learn to work with it, and I tell the story about taking my first surfing lesson and swimming against the waves and getting nowhere. That was my first two years of trying to get free from porn, just swimming against the waves and getting pummeled, just getting hit every time and making no progress. So as we learn to ask these deeper questions of, okay, what's underneath the surface of my sexual thoughts and feelings, it's like we get under the waves and we can move with them, we can move through them. There's this technique called urge surfing, and I have my own version of it, where you allow the waves of sexual energy to come and then you allow them to pass. This is a skill of breathing, observation and attunement BOA. That is one of the tools that can really help guys when they're triggered.

Speaker 2: 14:53

You know, you bring up the idea of being. You need to be able to drill, to go deeper, okay, to understand what's under the surface. Why do you think there's so many men who are, and even women too, women who struggle with porn and love addiction, that they're hesitant to do that?

Speaker 1: 15:14

Well, one of the big reasons is that a lot of us grew up in purity culture, and even those of us who didn't grow up in purity culture often still had a very anti-sexual upbringing, where this is something we don't talk about. This is something you have to keep a secret. So the idea of you know, figuring out what's that specific sexual fantasy all about, or why are we talking about this particular type of porn it's like that feels like it goes against everything we've been taught yeah, it's like a taboo subject for people with that.

Speaker 2: 15:49

You're a big believer in the inner child. You and I. We have a very common bond here. What is it about this therapeutic concept that got you interested?

Speaker 1: 16:04

When I started to get to know my 13-year-old self and then my even younger selves, the whole orphanage of inner children within me, I felt like Jesus loved me there and his love touched places that it had never touched before. And so many guys say well, I know intellectually that God loves me, but I don't feel it emotionally. And I believe another way of saying that is there are parts of me that don't feel the love of God at all and it's those inner children, it's those little boys within us that need to be rescued. That inner child concept resonates with me so much because I've learned that when I get triggered it's not mature, adult, logical Drew, it's the boy. I know a lot of people might be thinking well, that sounds kind of like new age or that sounds kind of hokey. Well, scientifically we're talking about implicit memory, body memory. Scientifically we're talking about implicit memory, body memory. And then biblically, I think about Psalm 131,.

Speaker 2: 17:17

I have stilled and quieted my soul within me, like a weaned child with its mother. Yeah, you know, and there's also the aspect of it and what I tried to communicate to people. The inner child is a metaphor, yes, or the pain that we dealt with as a child, adolescent and teen that has never been resolved, that continues to still haunt you today, subconsciously. Okay, now we've taken away all of the idea of there is like little kid running around inside.

Speaker 2: 17:50

No, no, oh, I'm schizophrenic no it is a metaphor to help you understand that your path is impeding and it is hurting some of the way you think, act and feel in your world today, especially when it comes to relating to your spouse or partner.

Speaker 1: 18:13

True, and it's a helpful metaphor. If the inner child metaphor doesn't resonate, that's okay. You and I have found that this has unlocked amazing healing for a lot of people.

Speaker 2: 18:25

Yeah, what are the steps? If people are listening today and they're like, oh wow, you know what? That sounds pretty interesting and I think I do have some wounds from the path. How does somebody go about discovering their inner child?

Speaker 1: 18:40

You can start by downloading a free PDF of chapter one of the book Heal the Boy to Free the man, and at the end of that chapter I give you a couple of exercises to be able to connect with your inner child, and one of them, called non-dominant handwriting, is really easy to use on your own. It's safe, and so, even without a therapist or counselor, you can get started and try that out. Try that out.

Speaker 2: 19:05

I mean, it probably is better to, at some point, to turn to someone who's been trained in this field that can kind of guide you along. Just for the fact that there are so many, you're going to hit a lot of different walls. Yes, like, for example, like, oh, I don't want to, you know, give myself the perception that my parents were bad or evil. And again, that's not what we do. We don't blame anyone, but we do hold people accountable for actions. You know, another aspect could be the idea of not being able to connect the dots all the time.

Speaker 1: 19:43

so, therefore, to have that other perspective to help you along the way, yeah, definitely, and if you read the book you will figure out where your walls and barriers are that you can take into therapy and counseling Excellent.

Speaker 2: 19:57

You also write about. The idea of having someone tell their story is something that can be extremely powerful. People don't want to tell their story. They don't even want to think about their story. So why is that the case? What happens when we can get people to open up and to share? We're not talking about getting up on your rooftop and shouting it to the world. I'm talking about, even if it's just one person. What's the benefit of doing that?

Speaker 1: 20:32

When you get into the details of exactly what you've struggled with and what's happened to you and what you're going through now, the shame is shattered, the silence is broken and evil begins to lose its grip and intimacy. What we truly need starts to grow.

Speaker 2: 21:00

Talk about the idea of really what's sitting behind the surface is intimacy, the need for intimacy.

Speaker 1: 21:09

Yeah, we were created for connection, for close relationships, for intimacy. Yet many of us grew up with a disconnected childhood, even if your parents loved you, even if you had so many privileges and great things going on, even if you had so many privileges and great things going on, whatever level of relationship we had we thought was normal, even if we were alone, even if we were misunderstood or abused or abandoned. Whatever we grow up with, we just think it's normal. But our bodies still crave that connection we were created for, and porn provides a symbolic sexual version of it.

Speaker 2: 21:58

Many of us don't really know what emotional intimacy is because we've never experienced it, and so we settle for a physical, sexualized version of it and and that's why, again, you know, after a while's partner being in the relationship for a while, they're like wait, the only time you want to come near me and touch me is when you want to be sexual. Other than that, if not, you want to play with your little marvel characters over here. Whatever, you know, not me, and and and they, they start to feel used. But again, they don't understand the dynamic and we're not saying it's correct and we're not saying it should be tolerated, but the dynamic is he's thinking oh, we're connecting, I'm bonding with you, isn't this great? Well, it's great, but I need more. And we're like I don't know what that more is. I don't know how to give it to you.

Speaker 1: 22:58

And that is why men struggle to love.

Speaker 2: 23:04

So let me ask you this what is your favorite thing about freedom from pornography?

Speaker 1: 23:29

My favorite thing about freedom from pornography. My favorite thing about freedom from pornography is that I now have a relationship with little Drew and with Jesus. So this is what I call the healing triangle my adult self, my inner child and Jesus.

Speaker 2: 23:46

That is the strongest triangle in my life. Powerful.

Speaker 1: 23:52

Very, very powerful. Nothing is going to break them back, and sometimes I experience Jesus through other people, through the men in my group or through a friend. So it's not saying that I don't need community. It's saying that oftentimes Jesus speaks and works through others.

Speaker 2: 24:10

What you're talking about here. This is your core, yes, this is your core, but the community has to surround it, because community is also emotional intimacy. Yeah, exactly, and so therefore, again, the balance. We've always been out of balance. But what you brought up earlier, well, we didn't know that. I don't know what I don't know. All I know is this is my life, this is how I live, and so be it. But now realizing, ooh, that balance needs to be leveled. You have a really fascinating parallel in the book the monster and the mouse. Tell people, take a few minutes and talk about that.

Speaker 1: 24:58

At the end of the book. I wanted to give you something that would allow you to really feel the truth of the book, not just read about it, but to have a different way to experience it. So it's fictional, it's a totally different genre. The idea is there's a man who lives in a house with a monster in the basement and he's always fighting against the monster. I won't give away the secret plot twist in the parable, and so when you, when you read the parable, it's a way of engaging your right brain you know we have left brain logic and right brain emotion, and so what's the right brain?

Speaker 2: 25:44

What do you mean?

Speaker 1: 25:47

Right brain in the wrong brain.

Speaker 2: 25:48

Yeah, I mean you want to talk about. The issue that we struggle with is the right hemisphere of our brain, you know, does not function as well as the left side does, and that drew pointed out. The right side is that emotional aspect, and that's why I love the fact you put something in there, because it kind of gives them the opportunity to have to use the right brain to really kind of feel, not think, feel. You know what you were writing about there.

Speaker 1: 26:22

Exactly.

Speaker 2: 26:23

So my last question what's the topic of your next book?

Speaker 1: 26:29

I still keep thinking about that. This has been so grueling and difficult to create over the last four years that I am not in a rush to do another book. The next book that is actually coming out with this one is the Alcroporn Workbook. Very good, so that you can go through this material and really process it not just read through it and get the information, but start to do the work of transformation. And it's going to be great for groups as well.

Speaker 2: 27:04

I was fortunate that I had the opportunity to be able to read this in its manuscript form. I have to tell you, right as I said before, there are many books that are out there. There are many books on a different topic. This is an outstanding book because, again, while it does get into some of the issues, it's more about the solution. It is about that idea of freedom. It's about the fact that the soothing techniques that you've used over the years we don't need to use them anymore.

Speaker 2: 27:43

We don't need it. There's other soothing techniques that are so much more powerful yes, so much more powerful. And Drew captures it. He captured it all in here. I've read it twice. I love the book. Yes, going to look forward to what the future brings, with Drew Boa as he continues to expand and helping men who are struggling out there and to allow them to feel and to experience freedom themselves. God bless you, my friend.

Speaker 1: 28:25

Thank you, eddie. Your words mean the world. Thanks for listening and don't forget to get your copy of Outgrow Porn at outgrowporncom. Always remember you are God's beloved son. In you he is well-pleased.