Episode 176: Ask a Coach: What to Do with Unwanted Thoughts and Images

Welcome to the Overcome Pornography For Good podcast where we take a research-based, trauma informed and results focused approach to quitting porn. This approach has been revolutionary and changed thousands and thousands of lives. I’m your host, Sara Brewer. 

Hey, everyone, welcome to today’s podcast episode. Now, I am doing a Q&A episode in a couple of weeks specifically around questions on these episodes that I did on masturbation, on healthy sexuality, on the porn panic and the porn myths, on any of the fantasy versus desire, porn literacy stuff. I’m going to be doing a Q&A on that. 

So if you have questions that you want me to address, go ahead and send those to [email protected]. Again, if you have questions that you want addressed on that episode, I can’t guarantee that I’ll address every single one of them, it just depends on how many questions we have come in. But we’ll try to address at least similar ones so that you get your question answered. That’s going to be [email protected]. Enjoy this episode. 

Kat: Hey, everyone, it’s Kat. I’m a coach here in the Overcome Pornography for Good program. I am so excited to be bringing you today’s Ask a Coach question. Today’s question is about what do I do with thoughts and images that come into my mind? 

And I want you to know first off that this is not a problem. We’re going to talk about the CTFAR model and these thoughts, okay? So when you have thoughts or images come into your mind, I want you to put those in the C line, okay? So that’s the first line, the circumstance line. That’s where we’re going to put these thoughts and these images. And I know when we’re talking about thoughts, that might not make sense, but we’re talking about something that is in the past, okay? 

So this thought or image, even if it was one second in the past, it’s still something from the past and we’re going to put it in that C line. It’s now going to be our circumstance and we’re going to make it neutral, okay? So you probably have lots of thoughts and feelings about thoughts and feelings and images in your head, okay? The thoughts and images that come into your mind. You probably have lots of thoughts and feelings about those. 

But I want you to make sure that you put it in that C line and that you make it neutral. And it might sound something like, this is a sentence in my brain, right? This is a thought. It’s just words in my head, okay? This is just an image. I’m just seeing an image in my head. This is just an image that I have in my mind, okay? We want to make it very neutral. So make sure you’re putting that in your C line to begin with. 

So then we want to find out what we’re currently thinking about those thoughts and those images that we had, okay? What is it that you believe about them? So it’s typically one of two things. So the reason that we ask this question, right, what do I do with these thoughts and images, is that we think that they’re a problem, right? And it could go one of two ways, most likely. I mean, of course, there’s hundreds of different possibilities, but it’s typically like, they’re bad. 

Maybe these thoughts come into our head. These images come, they’re bad. They’re terrible. I shouldn’t have these. I should not be thinking about this. This image shouldn’t be in my mind. I’ve got to get it out. I’ve got to get away from it, right? 

And when we start having those thoughts, so we’re moving from the C line to the T line. When we have those thoughts about the images that come into our mind, the thoughts that come into our mind, that they’re bad and they’re terrible, then we feel bad and we feel terrible. And sometimes we feel a lot of shame because I shouldn’t be doing this, right? I shouldn’t be thinking this. I shouldn’t have this image in my mind. 

Very shameful. So we get into that cycle of now we feel terrible. We feel bad. And then what do we typically do in our A line? We typically buffer, okay? So we might buffer with more porn. We might go to food. We might go to something else. But we get stuck in that cycle and that loop when that’s our thoughts about what’s going on in our head about the fact that we had a thought that came into our mind or we had an image that popped in there, okay? 

So that’s one thing that we do. The other thing that we might do is we might indulge, okay? So again, our circumstance line is I had a thought about something that I’d seen from the past or I had an image of a website that I’d looked at, whatever that is, right? That comes into our mind and then we indulge. 

So it might sound like I want more. I can’t wait to get home and look up X, Y, or Z. And we start to indulge in that. I want to see more. I like that. I want to see more of this image, so I’m going to go look for more, okay? 

And when we start having those thoughts, right? Okay, so that’s our new model. We still have our C, thoughts and images that we’ve seen. And then we have those, our thoughts about those thoughts and images are that I want more, right? And that creates in our feeling line, maybe urges. 

With our thoughts, we’re creating more urges for ourselves, right? We’re creating this feeling of needing more. And so what do we do? Maybe in our A line, we’re looking at porn, right? Like we go look up images on the internet. We go find those things. 

So those are typically what we can see and what we believe about that. So what we want to do, right? Those aren’t our only two options, of course. What we want to do is we want to start to believe or think things that are hopefully a little bit more neutral than what we’ve thought and believed before. 

So we’re not going to shame. We’re not feeling terrible about ourselves and we’re not going to indulgence. But we want to be somewhere in the middle, okay? So first off, we want to acknowledge that those thoughts are there. We don’t want to just push them away and willpower them away, like we talk about in the program. But we want to say, oh yeah, there it is. There’s a thought. There’s something that maybe I’ve seen in the past, an image pops into my head. Okay, there it is. 

And then we want to start believing different things. So in our thought line it might sound something like – These are just examples, and if none of these resonate with you, it’s okay. It might sound like I can let this go. This isn’t a problem. This is just a thought. It’s just an image in my mind. It’s just a sentence in my mind. I can allow for this. I don’t have to push it away. I don’t have to run. I am in control of this. This doesn’t have to be in control of me. 

It’s just passing through. Maybe we start to believe like, oh, this is just passing through. It doesn’t need to stay. I don’t have to keep it here. I don’t have to push it away. And we can start believing new things about those thoughts and images that we put in the C line and make them neutral. 

So first off, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to neutralize the thoughts and the images that we’ve had by putting them in the C-line, by making them factual, by understanding that they are there. We don’t have to make meaning of them. They don’t have to be emotionally charged. They’re just there. So we neutralize what’s going on with that. 

And then the second thing we do is we acknowledge that it’s there and we choose intentionally the thoughts that we want to have about them. Okay? That’s it. So if you have any questions, bring them to the Ask a Coach and we can help you more with this. But I promise you those thoughts and images are not a problem. And we’re just going to choose how we’re going to think about them on purpose and intentionally. 

Thanks, you guys, for being here. We’ll see you guys next time.

I want to invite you to come and listen to my free class, How To Overcome Pornography For Good Without Using Willpower. We talk about how to stop giving in to urges without pure willpower or relying on phone filters so that you can actually stop wanting pornography. 

We talk about how to stop giving up after a few weeks or months. And spoiler alert, the answer isn’t have more willpower. And then lastly, we talk about how to make a life without porn easily sustainable and permanent. 

If you’re trying to quit porn, this class is a game changer. So you can go and sign up at Sarabrewer.com/masterclass, and it is totally free.