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. Today we are talking about how to prevent relapse when you flop. Not if you flop, but when you flop. Have you ever felt numb, empty, dull, or dead inside? Have you ever felt so tired that you have absolutely nothing left? And with zero energy, it feels inevitable to give in to sexual temptation. Do you know what it's like to drift into daydreaming and fantasizing until you're sliding down the slippery slope toward relapse? This episode is for you. You will learn about the flop reaction, why we flop, and how you can flop in a healthy way to prevent relapse. First, what do we mean by this idea of flopping? Flop is one of the five fear reactions that you learn about in Husband Material Academy fight, flee, fawn, freeze, and flop. Picture it this way. If the fight reaction is like a wolf aggressively attacking, and the flee reaction is like a rabbit anxiously avoiding, and the freeze reaction is like a deer in the headlights, completely frozen. And maybe the fawn reaction is like chameleon shape-shifting to fit into what other people want. But then the flop reaction is like a turtle withdrawing into its shell, going away from the world to survive. These survival instincts are incredible. God created them. They're not bad. And at the same time, we can get stuck in them. And when we don't process these feelings, we are at risk of a relapse. While fight, flee, fawn, and freeze might be described as hyper-arousal, your body charging up in response to a threat, the flop reaction is different. It's hypoarousal, it's your body shutting down. The technical therapy term for this is dissociation, a mobilized detachment, a physical state of collapse. You know you're in flop when your eyes glaze over, you're staring into space, maybe slumping down in your seat. You might feel hollow, like you're not yourself. You might lose track of time. In flop, you're physically present but mentally absent. In flop, it's like the lights are on, but nobody's home because you've gone somewhere else in your mind, in your phone. When you're in flop, your eyes glaze over, you stare into space, you might feel a sense of doom or dread, but it doesn't motivate you to action. It leads you into despair. It has this feeling of hollowness. Like I'm not myself. It can include thoughts like, I can't do this. The world is too much. I just don't care anymore. I give up. There's no hope. These thoughts and feelings can be so dark and depressing that flop naturally makes you want to escape somehow and distract yourself, maybe through your phone, through scrolling on social media, through daydreaming, through sexually fantasizing, and eventually through watching porn. Out of fight, flee, fawn, freeze, and flop, I find that flop is the most common precursor to porn. It is the trigger of all triggers. And you might think to yourself, man, wouldn't it be nice if I just never flopped again? If I just didn't have that reaction. But the truth is, there's a reason why we flop. In fact, there are some very good reasons. We don't flop because we're bad or because we're broken. We flop because we're human. There is a time and a place to numb in a limited way with intention. And there's a time and a place to fall apart, to spiral, to just not be okay. And in fact, God has given us the flop reaction to help us survive. It's a brilliant strategy that I want to unpack for you a little bit through the lens of the animal kingdom. Earlier we talked about the fight reaction like a wolf and the flea reaction like a rabbit. Imagine a rabbit is running away from a pack of wolves and it gets caught. The flop reaction is like playing dead. When the rabbit flops in the jaws of the wolf, playing dead serves two purposes. First, conserving energy, and second, numbing pain. First, conserving energy. If the rabbit rests long enough and waits for the right time, maybe it can run even faster and escape from the wolf. So the flop reaction provides some rest. And secondly, it's a natural painkiller. It provides relief from the overwhelm, from the insensible violence that it's experiencing. And I want to suggest that when you experience the flop reaction, it can actually help you by indicating the need for rest and relief. We don't need to try to never flop, but rather we can interpret it as an alert, a signal that we need rest and relief. It's a call to conserve energy and at least get some kind of break from the daily stress or the extreme intensity that you may have been experiencing. Let me give you some examples. If you have a high-intensity job or if you have certain times of the year that are more stressful than usual, you're probably familiar with that post-adrenaline depression that follows a big project or a really hard push. If you are involved in high-intensity learning, like you're going to medical school or some kind of academic program that's pushing you to your limit, you know the flop experience after finals week is over. If you're married and your relationship is recovering from the impact of sexual betrayal, there will probably be some times when you feel like you just can't keep going and you don't know how you're going to find the energy and everything in you just wants to flop. If you have some high-intensity children like I do, then you will probably experience the flop reaction pretty consistently at the end of a long day, especially after the chaos of bedtime. Or maybe you're a highly sensitive person and life just feels like a lot for you a lot of the time. After periods of high intensity, when the chemicals in your brain are depleted, it is normal to have a crash in your energy levels, in your motivation, in your focus, in your willpower. Because the question is not if you will flop, but when and how. It is a normal part of our nervous system flowing in and out like the tide that we will have low moments and low periods. And when you notice yourself going into the flop reaction, feeling low energy, numb, disconnected, empty, hollow, dull, dead inside, so tired that you have nothing left. That's like hitting the rumble strips on the side of the road. And in this episode, I want to teach you how to gently pull over onto the shoulder or into a nearby street rather than crashing the car into the ditch on the side of the road and causing destruction. Sooner or later, you will find yourself in flop. So the question is, when you flop, how can you prevent relapse and choose a healthy way to regulate? And I have three suggestions for you. Flop with a purpose, flop with a friend, and flop with your body. Let me explain what I mean. First, flop with a purpose. The danger is in the drifting. One of my favorite quotes from D.A. Carson says, people do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate towards godliness, prayer, obedience to scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. In other words, if you're drifting, it's not toward health. It's not toward God. It's not toward healing. On the flip side, proactively choosing to flop with a purpose can be healing and healthy and normal. For example, I usually get sick about once a year and it takes me a few days to recover. When I'm in bed all day, I actually proactively decide to binge watch movies. I don't watch movies almost at all throughout the entire year, but when I'm sick, I intentionally, purposefully lay out a plan for myself to get through it, to conserve energy and to numb the pain, and it works really well because this is proactive rather than passive, it's purposeful rather than drifting, and it's actually part of my recovery. Now, there needs to be a healthy boundary on our chosen flop behaviors. For example, once I am no longer sick, I am no longer binge watching movies. And that's a limit that I'm able to hold. If you find yourself unable to put a limit on the behaviors that you plan ahead to do when you're flopping, it's probably a sign that it's part of the addictive cycle rather than part of your recovery. Here's an example of flopping with purpose. When your energy level is low and you need to rest, and when the stress and pain in your life feels like too much and you need relief, maybe instead of scrolling social media and getting dopamine hits from one-minute YouTube videos, you could put on one of your favorite movies, one that brings you closer to God or has a healing message that means a lot to you. This is an example of allowing yourself to get distracted in a healthy way, on purpose. Another example might be playing video games. For me, that was part of my ritual that would take me to porn. However, it could also be part of a ritual that helps you connect with your inner child. The difference is the intention, the sense of purpose, the reason why you're doing it. Maybe reading a book feels like it takes too much energy, but listening to an audiobook or this podcast feels more restorative. The key is to flop with a purpose. On the road trip of sexual recovery, when you feel like you can't go on, it's okay to pull over to the side of the road or to a nearby parking lot and take a nap. Give yourself rest and relief so that you can return to the road when you're ready. So far, I've been talking about flop as an individual experience because we usually don't let other people in when we're feeling this way. When you're flopping, like a turtle withdrawing into its shell, it's natural and normal that you probably don't want to see other people, talk to other people. Yet there is so much power in flopping with a friend. Literally, flop into the arms of someone who loves you. Allow yourself to fall apart, verbally vomit, be unimpressive, and let yourself be loved in the middle of your mess like a turtle without its shell. There are lots of reasons why we don't do this. We might tell ourselves, I don't want to annoy that person, I don't want to be a burden, I don't want to bring them down. But when you invite a friend into your raw, real, unedited, unpolished feelings, it is a blessing because it's a sacred space. It is a gift to be trusted with that level of vulnerability. And when you do that, you are not only opening yourself up to this other person, you are opening yourself up to the grace of God. Now we need to be selective about who we share with because it probably has to be a special person to love you and listen to you and just be with you for however long you need when you're flopping. And at Husband Material, you can find safe men who can hold space for you with curiosity and compassion, even for your darkest sexual thoughts and feelings and parts of your story that you're ashamed of. And while that's amazing, there are times when you can't reach out, or when no one answers the phone. And when that happens, there's one more version of flop I would like to suggest, and that is to flop with your body, literally, do nothing. Allow yourself to just be bored, like physically, lie down on the ground, take a nap, stop doing, just be. I recently heard a neuroscientist talk about how boredom is important. It's not something to avoid at all costs, as our phones allow us to do. Through just being, you can start to reset your dopamine levels and allow your attention to re-emerge so you can be present in the moment. Sometimes doing nothing is doing something really important, especially in an age where there's always something to do and always another distraction. If you can be bored and stay with that feeling and mindfully, attentively let your mind do what it was designed to do. You might find that the pull of porn gets weaker. If you want some practical advice on how to prevent relapse and reset your dopamine levels by doing nothing, try out the path plan by Dan Johnson. P-A-T-H. P stands for pause. A stands for acknowledge the urge to watch porn. T stands for timer. Set a timer for 10 minutes, and this is when you get to do nothing. Or whatever might be restful or relieving to you without porn, without some kind of sexual stimulation. And at the end of the 10 minutes, give yourself a high five. So P-A-T-H stands for pause, acknowledge, timer, and high five. And maybe that 10-minute container gives you the space you need to flop without falling back into unwanted sexual behavior. My friend, the next time you find yourself highly sensitive to what's happening around you or going through a high-intensity experience at work or at home or at school, remember it's normal to feel the flop. It's normal to feel empty and exhausted, the need to distract yourself or numb the pain. And when you do, I hope you will reframe the flop reaction as an invitation to rest and relief. And you can find those things by flopping with a purpose, by flopping with a friend, and by literally just physically allowing your body to collapse in a focused, mindful way. You can outgrow porn. You can prevent relapse. Don't drift. If you dissociate, do it on purpose. Invite people into your mess and allow yourself to just be and rest and find relief in ways that restore your soul. Because you are God's beloved Son, and in you he is well pleased.