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Welcome to the House of Materials Podcast, where we help first and then how to grow for why our frequency brands fill your heart and setting your relationship. My name is Rebo, and I'm here to talk about Let's Go for today. He is incredibly wise, mature, and skilled at helping people connect with God, with themselves, with each other. And his teaching on how to process sexualized emotions is the first episode of Husband Material that we are publishing in English and in Spanish. So to make it truly the same episode in both languages, I did not interview him, I just invited him to teach. So here is Jonathan's teaching in English on how to process sexualized emotions. Enjoy the episode.

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Hello everyone, I am Jonathan Hernandez, a very recently added HM coach. And I wanted to talk to you about sexualized emotions. So if you guys heard the previous episode in this podcast, Drew interviewed Dr. Glenn and Phyllis. They are the founders of Connection Codes. If you haven't heard it yet, I really, really advise you to go and listen to it right now because it's amazing. It's really good. I am a really good friend of Dr. Glenn and Phyllis. I am also a Connection Codes coach. So they created the Connection Codes framework and I am part of it. And I coach couples all over the world and just teaching them how to process their emotions in real time and how to connect deeply. But I'm also very passionate about men and how we as men understand sexuality and how we understand emotions as well. Because this might be a surprise for many people here, but the way we process our emotions can be sexualized. And sometimes we don't have a crazy problem with sexuality, or it's not like, oh my gosh, like I am a very, very sexual person that like really really wants to have sex all the time, and like I can't control this desire for sex. And sometimes it's not like you have a crazy desire for sex, but it's more that you have a need that hasn't been met, an emotional need, and it comes out in a sexual way. So we're here to talk about all of this. So if you can take notes, because what I'm gonna show you here, what I'm gonna tell you here today, is something that you can take home and do every every day. And it's something that's changed my life completely, and that's why I want to share this with you guys. Let's begin. Sexualized emotions. Picture an eight-year-old kid that's stressed out because they have to do schoolwork, because they can't play video games if they don't read for an hour, if they don't read a book for an hour, and they are just stressed out of their minds, and they're like, Oh my gosh, like I don't want to read, I want to go play video games, I want to go play outside, but they don't actually have a way to process this emotion. This emotion might be anger, or it might be sadness, or it might even be loneliness because they have to read their book alone, and that means they're not gonna be able to be with their friends or hang out with their friends and play or play video games with a friend because they have to read first. So just picture this, go into this kid's life, and all of a sudden this kid realizes that he can masturbate, he can touch himself, and it feels great, it feels amazing, it feels really good, and then he just starts doing it every once in a while. That's my story as a kid. That's me at eight years old. I learned to process loneliness through sexual stimulation, through masturbation first, and then when I was 11, I found pornography. I was homeschooled, and so I was in my computer, I was 11, alone in my house, and I was really, really curious about sex. So I was like, what would happen if I look up sex on Google? Maybe I'll find something interesting here. And while I did find something very interesting, and it changed my life completely, I didn't know it was gonna change my life, that what I was about to see was gonna change my whole way of looking at the world, but it did, and it violated my brain. And from that moment on, everything changed because I didn't just have masturbation to process my loneliness. Now I had porn, and porn would show me people that were being intimate with each other, that would be that were being vulnerable with each other, people that were willing to be naked in front of each other or naked in front of me. And I didn't know at the time, but that was a message of vulnerability to me, and I wanted so much vulnerability, I wanted to feel connected with someone like that, and so every time I was by myself in my house trying to do my schoolwork, I would go and watch pornography, I would go and masturbate because I had this sense of not being alone when I did that. My childhood is filled with loneliness. I went to normal school for the first few years of my life, and then from fifth grade on, I was homeschooled. And that was a crazy shift for me where I was alone a lot of the time, and well, that's when I discovered pornography, right? So in that moment or in that time, I realized that if I had sexual pleasure, I could bypass loneliness. Of course, I didn't know this in like a cognitive level where I was like, oh yeah, yeah, if I do this, I'm gonna end up bypassing loneliness. But that's what I was doing. And now I know that's what I was doing. And even today, when I am doing work by myself, when I have to be in my computer by myself, I feel that anxiety, that pull, that desire to masturbate, because that's something that I grew up with as a little kid to bypass the loneliness, to bypass the uncomfortable feeling of having to go through something by myself. So I sexualized my loneliness. I sexualized this emotion in my life. So every single time I felt it, I would just go and watch porn masturbate, I would feel good about it, I would be like, oh yeah, like finally I had some release of this stress. And if you guys have been listening to this podcast for a while, then you might know some of the neurological things that happened with masturbation in pornography. Something very, very important and something very, very interesting that happens is that when we watch porn, dopamine gets released in our brain, and that's the joy hormone. That's what I like calling the joy hormone because you just feel a lot of joy, you just feel a lot of pleasure, and it's like, oh my gosh, this is so good. And then we kind of relax after that, after having that like joy hit or that dopamine hit, and then it's like oh, you're relaxed, you're processed, you are regulated. So porn helps us regulate. It is an answer, it is an antidote, it's not the main problem. It is a problem, however, it's something that if you're listening to this podcast, you probably don't want to have, and you probably don't want to be watching pornography, but it is something that your body is using as the antidote. It's something that your body's using as the answer to all of your problems because it regulates you. It's like hitting the brake in the car when you're like speeding up and you're like, ugh, and you just hit the brake and it's like masturbation and porn help you get to that place super fast, right? But what if we could actually be able to process emotion without having to sexualize it? What if we can catch it before it goes into trying to do something sexual to release it? And we can learn to process our emotions in a way that's not sexual, in a way that doesn't go into pornography or unwanted sexual compulsion, and that is saying our emotions out loud. So, why would that even help? Well, once you say your emotions out loud, your brain is able is able to make sense of them. What do I mean by that? There's five neural regions in your brain, and you probably already heard this in the previous podcast, but there's five neural regions in your brain that house emotion. They house the emotion chemically. So when you feel anger, all these chemicals get fired up in your brain, and then you feel the anger, you feel it in your body, you feel it in your person. Same with loneliness, same with sadness, with every single emotion. But when we are able to say the emotion, our limbic system, which is these five regions that connect or that house emotion, our limbic system gets connected to our prefrontal cortex. And the prefrontal cortex is this part of our brain that makes sense of things. So it's a part of our brain that thinks logically, that can organize things, it's the part of our brain that thinks, oh, maybe I shouldn't have another pizza slice, because if I have more than four, it's gonna be way too much and I'm not gonna feel good. That's the prefrontal cortex. And the limbic system is the emotion part of you that's like, oh my gosh, like I feel a lot of anger, I feel a lot of joy, I feel a lot of loneliness, I feel all these things. And when this is activated, and when it's activated on a high level, our prefrontal cortex disconnects, right? So prefrontal cortex disconnects from the limbic system, but when we're able to name our emotion, they get connected again, and that's really important because when they get connected again, we make sense of our emotion, and then it starts getting processed up in our bodies, and that is something very, very powerful. So you can see that with fear, for example, when when you're afraid to go on a roller coaster or something like that, maybe you have a story like this. I've had stories like this because I hate roller coasters, but when I'm with someone and I'm able to voice my fear and be like, oh my gosh, I'm so afraid to go into this game and like I don't want to. And when I see that these people, my friends or my parents are with me in the game. I'm thinking about me when I was younger and my parents would go with me to this roller coaster. I would feel way safer and I'll be able to do it. I'll be able to go on the roller coaster, yes, feel the fear, but it diminishes and it lets me do what I want to do or what I am choosing to do because now the emotion doesn't control me, because I'm able to say it, process it up, and have someone there to listen to me and be with me in the emotion. So that's why saying our emotions is extremely important and it's very, very, very necessary when it comes to our recovery from porn consumption or from sexual compulsion. Because if you start realizing it and if you start being curious with your own sexuality and with the way you act it out, then you might realize that a lot of it comes from unprocessed emotions. For me, it's been loneliness for a long time, and when I'm able to voice that loneliness and to say what's happening for me, it changes everything. And for you, it could be anger, it could be loneliness as well. I don't know. But when we start getting curious, we can name it, we can make sense of it, and we don't have to hit the break in a sense or use something sexual to regulate. That's kind of like an emergency button where it's like, oh my gosh, I need to regulate somehow. Let's go and do something sexual, let's go and watch porn and then I'll be regulated. But you're able to stop before that and name your emotion. So, how are you gonna do this? Is this sounds really overwhelming or really hard? It sounds like how do I even start? Well, I want to start with loneliness first, the message of loneliness and the need of loneliness, because every emotion, every core emotion has a message and a need. So the message of loneliness is I'm alone and without support. This is a tricky one because some people think they're never lonely because they're with people around all the time, or they just enjoy their time alone, and so you're like, Well, I'm never lonely. But lonely really means being without support. So, what does that mean? Like maybe you have to work on something by yourself, like me, then you don't feel like you have support from anyone there, or maybe you have to, I don't know, clean up the whole house by yourself. You have no support. Or maybe you are you feel a lot of joy about doing something that's fun for you and nobody else wants to do it with you. Oh, no support with doing the thing that you want to do. So everything changes when we look at loneliness like not having support. And then that's the message of loneliness. So, what's the need of loneliness? The need of loneliness is that I need to find connection and authentic or safe support. And to be able to find that connection or save support, I need to be able to voice my loneliness so that someone can meet me there in love and so that someone can be in my loneliness with me. When someone's in my loneliness with me, I actually get the need met because then oh, I have that support that I needed, because I was able to voice that I didn't have support, and then someone came and supported me in that. So guess what? I'm no longer lonely. Now we can't control our emotions, we can't control what we feel. And if there's something that I want you to take from this podcast, is that very thing that we can't control what we feel. We can't control what we think, but we can't control what we feel. Maybe you hear a church like, choose joy, do not be afraid, don't ever be afraid, because the Lord is with you. And that sounds amazing, but how am I gonna not be afraid? How am I gonna choose joy? Like, I can try to choose joy today. I wake up in the day and I wake up in the morning, and then I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna choose joy today, and it's gonna be an amazing day. And then let's say I go outside and there's a hurricane or there's an earthquake, there's an earthquake out of nowhere. Oh, I'm gonna feel fear. And you know what? That fear is good. There's this thing that Dr. Glenn says about every single time that you hear the phrase do not fear in the Bible, and in the Greek and in the Hebrew, it actually says, Don't panic and run away when you feel fear. And that changes everything. Because it's not like God doesn't want you to feel an emotion, He's saying, wait, wait, wait, don't panic and run away when you feel fear. Because I know you're gonna feel fear, but I want you to be able to process it in a safe way or in a healthy way. So we can't choose what we feel, but we can choose our next action, we can choose our behavior. When we don't make space for our emotions, when we don't make space to process our emotions, then they control our behavior. So, for example, if I feel the loneliness and I don't make space for it, and I don't name it and I don't become aware of it, I can end up watching porn and masturbating, and that loneliness is gonna take control of my behavior because I didn't make space for it. Because when I don't make space for it, it grows and grows and grows and grows until it takes control of me and then takes control of my behavior. So that's why for me it's so important to be able to name it, to say it, name it, to tame it. Maybe you've heard that phrase before. And it's so so so so important for me to be able to do that. So I hope this is helpful for you so far. How are you gonna do this in a practical way? Well, something that I really like doing in my own life is writing out my emotions. I write out my emotion wheel every single morning. You can do it at night as well if you want, and it takes only from two to five minutes because you are only choosing one phrase or one sentence for each emotion. And it's amazing, it's only eight core emotions, and when you're able to do this, you can feel way more in yourself. You're way more aware of what's happening with your emotions, and then it helps you be able to voice these emotions with somebody else that's actually safe for you. So that's something that I do. I write my emotions out daily, and that just helps me be processed up. Where I'm like, oh, I'm feeling loneliness when I work on this project. Maybe I need to find support here, and maybe I should not work on it alone. Maybe I can just go and hang out with my girlfriend and be with her while I'm working on my own thing. She's working on her own thing, but then she's with me there, and I feel support just being close to her. You're gonna know what you need, but to be able to get to that place, you gotta be able to voice and to know what you're feeling so that you can know what you need. Another thing that I want to talk to you about is joy and the joy of sexual stimulation. Because this is a whole whole big thing. We heard this message from Purity Culture that if we felt joy about sexuality, then we were bad people. And maybe you heard it in different ways throughout life or throughout purity culture. This is the message or the core message of it. If you feel joy about sexuality, you're bad and you are not okay, and there's something wrong with you, and you're sinful, and that's not true. Again, God created sexuality and He created that joy response we get from sexuality. When that gets twisted and hijacked, then what do we do? So, for example, if I'm able to understand that I'm gonna feel joy when I see a beautiful woman on the street, then I can voice it. I can be like, oh, joy, joy about that girl that's walking by, joy about that beautiful body that I just saw. But I don't need to do anything about that joy. I can just say, hmm, joy. I felt joy. Why do I say that? Why do I voice it? Because it helps me process it. And if I don't say it, and if I'm just like, ah yeah, yeah, that girl's pretty, but I shouldn't think about it. And oh my gosh, my body's activated. No, no, no, I shouldn't feel this way, I shouldn't feel this way, no, no, no, no, I'm gonna get distracted. If I do that, that joy experience is gonna grow in my body, and then it could take control of my body in a way that's not good. Like, oh, maybe I need some sexual release, maybe I'm just gonna masturbate thinking about that girl that I saw on the street, right? And all that happened why? Because I didn't voice my joy, I didn't put a name to my experience. So that's why this is so important. So we're gonna feel joy from sexual stimuli. That's just gonna happen. We are human beings, men and women, we all feel it. We all feel it when we see something that we like, when we see something beautiful, and for me, this is an invitation to process the joy and to direct it up to God. So, what do I mean by this? There's something that I got from Christopher West and the theology of the body, but he talks about letting beauty turn into a signpost to the beauty of God. So, what I like about that is combining connection codes with theology of the body and saying, wow, I feel joy about that beautiful woman right there. And thank you, Jesus, for making her. Thank you for making her so, so, so beautiful. Thank you because you open my eyes to such a beauty, and I can direct this to you. Because if she's beautiful, you created her, then how much more beautiful are you, Jesus? And then this is a created person, right? She can't actually fulfill my desire for eternal beauty because I have that desire deep inside of me. We all have it in our core. We have that desire for beauty, just deep eternal beauty, and it never gets satiated. We could try with all these beautiful women, like Solomon did in the Bible, and just have a whole bunch of wives and do all these things, and you're not gonna be filled. That's what Solomon said. Like, hey, like I had all these things, all these women, I had absolutely everything, and I don't feel fulfilled. What is that saying? Oh boy, I have a deep desire for something eternal. So for me, when I feel joy, sexual joy, or joy about someone that activates me sexually or something, I can listen to it, I can give it a voice and be like, oh, I feel joy. And this is just touching into this deep eternal desire that I have that I can actually point at Jesus and say, Wow, God, if that person's so beautiful, how much more beautiful are you? And how do I point this joy to you? How do I open it up all the way to you? So that's something that I love doing when it comes to sexual activation from any kind or because we are all different and we all have different attractions, right? Or different attraction templates. But when you're able to make space for that joy in a healthy way, where you see something and you're like, oh, joy, I feel joy about that, and then you direct it to an eternal source, then wow, that's amazing. That's so so good because you're doing something about it. The message of joy is that felt good, let's do it again. And the need of joy is I need pleasure to thrive in life. So if I'm able to direct this pleasure to the eternal, or even just voice it, then I have a space where I can be like, oh, I have a space to see beauty, to see pleasure, I have a space for that, and then direct that to God. And then I have the space also to honor my wife. I have the space to honor the people around me and to honor beauty like God created me to honor it. And I think this is so important because I think God gave us this activation to beautiful things, and he doesn't take it away because he wants to show us how to see beauty like he sees beauty, because he created beauty, and so a step for me to do that is to be able to voice my emotion. I hope you guys can get something good out of this and start doing your emotion wheel every day, every morning if you want. We also have the foundations course in connection codes. So I'm gonna leave you my link for you to get a discount, special discount for that foundations course if you want to take it. If you want to take it with your wife or with your people that are close to you, maybe your family, your friends, you want to take it with people that you want to build community with. This is amazing because when you're able to have this culture together, then you can go and have space to process your emotions with the people closest to you. And they can do the same with you, and you guys can be safe places for each other. So this course is amazing. I did it with my girlfriend, with my parents, and with my girlfriend sister, and it's amazing the kind of culture that you create around your closest people. So this is a beautiful, beautiful thing to do. And have someone, have someone that you can talk to, have someone that you can tell your emotions to daily. We feel each of the core emotions every single day. And you might say, Well, I didn't feel loneliness today. Maybe you felt a little bit of it, just a little tiny bit of loneliness. And when you have people around you that you can do this with, that you can do the core emotion wheel with, that you can tell your emotions to, then you live a connected life. And remember that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety but connection. What I'm telling you here, guys, is the framework for deep connection. And that leads to freedom from addiction because now you have a connected life. So, yes, thank you for listening to me. Thank you for taking the time. You guys can see my links down below. I have a PDF where you guys can see all the emotions needs and all the emotions messages, and where you can actually have a little template to write out your emotions daily. So you can go out into the link section and go see it. It's$7 right now, so it's cheap, it's just less than a meal, it's like a coffee, and you can go get it and start doing it daily. And then you're also gonna have the link for the foundations course down there.

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Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to connect with Jonathan, go down to the links in the show notes. Always remember you are God's beloved son, and you, he is well pleased.