Start Younger And The Real Problem

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Welcome to Start Younger, the podcast about outgrowing porn, understanding our sexuality, and building healthy recovery practices.

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Porn is reaching boys sooner than ever, which means helping and healing has to start sooner, too. Let's start younger.

Men Have Feelings And That Matters

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Welcome back to the Start Younger podcast. I'm here with Blake Brinkman and Doug Carpenter, and we're here to talk about feelings. Whoop.

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Men don't have feelings.

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Starting off with the hot takes. The hot ones.

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Yes, that is the toxic masculinity. We are here to deconstruct.

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In case you turn it off immediately, feelings are good and valid, and uh we want you to keep listening.

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For many of us, especially as boys or men, we can feel like having emotions is weakness or expressing emotions is a feminine thing. And we may also have no space with parents or peers or people in general to just feel angry or ashamed or alone and to have those feelings be okay.

How Feelings Turn Into Sexual Urges

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So unfortunately, when our emotions have nowhere to go, because I don't know what I'm feeling, I don't even know how to feel what I'm feeling, they go straight into your penis. And I've often had this experience where I'm feeling a very strong sexual urge, and I don't really know why it's there. But when I start to ask, hmm, what's going on in my life earlier today? Or what's underneath this? Like, what am I actually feeling emotionally? Or if I call a friend and we can talk about it and I'm more likely to get to the root of what's happening, I find it's not a sexual urge at all. This is actually a deeper feeling. And we're aware of this typically with something like anger, where if I'm really angry on the surface, maybe underneath it I feel hurt, or maybe underneath it I feel ashamed about myself. Or maybe underneath it, I just feel really sad because I lost something or someone that I loved. And so it's coming out as anger in the same way, those same emotions can come out as sexual arousal.

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I think we have to understand, and I'm not trying to, number one, I'm not trying to make this funny, and number two, I'm not trying to make this too scientific. But, you know, I've told boys before, it's like your penis is a dopamine lever. What I mean by that is if you're experiencing an emotion that is uncomfortable for you or you don't like or you don't know what to do with, our body has a way of balancing that out. We go do something that we like or enjoy or eat something, and that increases the level of dopamine, which brings balance into our brain about the negative emotion that we're experiencing. And when boys are having huge surges of testosterone, one way to do that is through porn or masturbation because it immediately increases that dopamine, then takes away, at least for a period of time, that emotion that they're feeling. So there's there's science to back up that boys sexualize their feelings or turn to sex and porn as a relief from their feelings.

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Spot on the vast majority of what I first start working on with teens is this idea of how do we understand this first off? Because sometimes it's just confusing, right? Of I'm feeling things and then all of a sudden I'm watching pornography or I'm masturbating. And that's where that shame kicks in of why am I doing this? And it's important awareness and educational understanding, like you're saying, Doug, of my brain is doing this almost automatically because it's become my hardwired way that I deal with uncomfortable emotions. And most of our homes as teenagers, we were not taught how to deal with uncomfortable emotions. And you know who was willing to deal with our uncomfortable emotions? Pornography. And so it it makes sense that our brains get tied to that. And so I have no shame on any teenager who is in that struggle, in that journey. And now that we have that awareness, we get to start to explore okay, what does it look like to experience, to digest these emotions in healthy ways, to metabolize them in a way that I've been designed for.

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And no pun intended here, but it has a happy ending. It leads to orgasm, which is one of the most pleasurable things we as humans get to experience, and the chemical reactions that happen for that. So it it just makes sense that when we're feeling uncomfortable, we run to something that will offer us ultimate comfort.

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Something that will transform pain into pleasure. Yes. There is no such thing as a negative emotion. Sometimes we use that language because it's the only language we have, but there are uncomfortable emotions, unpleasant emotions, and more comfortable, pleasant emotions. And when we don't process our emotions, especially for young boys and men, they become sexualized. Oftentimes, our sexual thoughts and feelings, attractions to certain people, or urges to watch porn that are intense, maybe even irresistible, are just the surface level of deeper feelings and emotions that we may not be aware of, that me we may not know what to do with.

Stories Of Anxiety And Loneliness

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So in this episode, we want to help you understand why and how to process your emotions instead of sexualizing them.

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Drew, I think that could be a little confusing to listeners like how does unprocessed emotions become sexualized? And I know it's early to jump in with resources, but there's an a book, and it's a little older at this point, but it's called Love, Lust, and Anger from Maureen Canning. And that book does an excellent job of describing how uh emotion, especially the emotion of anger, can easily become sexualized. So if you want to understand more about that topic, there are definitely books out there that can help you understand how emotions become sexualized for men and sometimes women too, but especially in this area of sexual addiction and recovery for men.

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To give a story that kind of um describes this a little bit, right? When when I was growing up as a teenager, the overwhelming emotion I felt was a sense of fear and anxiety. And when I started to, I didn't know this at the time as a teen, but when I started to get more and more understanding of the emotions I was feeling, it was really a fear of being humiliated or ridiculed in some way, shape, or form. And with no space to really process these emotions or experience them, digest them in healthy ways, they got what Drew called sexualized, right? Which really meant for me of I went to pornography to try and process these emotions. I went to pornography to find the places, the images, the videos, the scenes that made me feel like I wasn't ridiculed, that made me feel like I wasn't humiliated, made me feel like I was somebody, that I was powerful, that I was chosen, that I was wanted. And so that's just an example of what this kind of looks like to have emotions sexualized.

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Porn becomes a place to take anxiety or anger or loneliness or envy, searching for the qualities I wish I had or I feel like I don't have.

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I know one of the main emotions for me in my adolescence was my deep sense of loneliness, and especially my deep sense of loneliness about male connection. So I'm older and I grew up in a generation where we didn't have the internet, we didn't have easy access to pornography like we do in today's world. But I can tell you that my deep sense of loneliness kept me connected to some of the sexual abuse I was experiencing. You know, and I know that's not the topic of today's podcast, but I think when you experience an emotion that's not being processed, it can become like sexualized with pornography in today's world. But also if you have an unhealthy connection to another person, some of those behaviors can become sexualized as well. So, you know, that was the main emotion for me and my youth that drove some of my problematic behaviors was loneliness.

Processing Emotions In Safe Community

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So, what does it actually look like to process our feelings, to find spaces where we won't be rejected or judged, and how we feel and what we want actually makes a difference? The place to do that is in an emotionally safe community or friendship. So in this podcast right now, we are going to demonstrate what that looks like. We are going to do a feelings check-in or an emotional check-in. This is something that you can do with a friend. This is something you can do with your parent or child. This is something you can do in a group, or you could even do it on your own through journaling. And to support our emotional check-in, all three of us have brought pillows. And you can find a link to these pillows in the show notes. Doug and Blake have the classic feeling wheel pillow, and I have a supercharged one. It's it's a little bit more complex. It's from humansystems.co. And we're gonna use these pillows to counteract alexithymia. Alexithymia is a fancy word that means I don't know how I'm feeling. And that is where porn starts to get its power.

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We have to have language around our emotion. You know, if you look at elementary curriculum, we're not really teaching about emotions. And so if you ask a lot of people how they feel, they'll just give you a one-word answer, oh, I'm fine, or I'm okay. I'm good. Yeah, I'm good. You know, that's not an emotion. That's not a feeling. That's not answering the question, how do you feel? So this, these pillows break down these emotions and and and take them from like sadness into deeper emotion and then deeper emotions where the core is sadness. And we have to help people put language to their emotion. There's a phrase in DBT called, you have to name it to tame it. Well, we have to name our emotions. We have to be able to even say what I'm feeling. And so that's part of what we're gonna demonstrate today is is maybe how to get beyond that surface level and how to get deeper into naming our emotion.

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Well, and two, to kind of build some foundation of why we're heading into this and to kind of validate why is this happening to me, right? And for the vast majority of, especially men out there, that there's been a cultural communication of this idea that men don't have feelings. And if you do have feelings, you should shove them down deep somewhere that no one else will see them. And we've just seen over the years how untrue that is. And not only how untrue it is, how painful and hurtful it is to ourselves as men, and to all the people around us that we really care about. And so name it to tame it. My my mentor as uh when he says of you have to feel it to heal it. Yes, I like that. We have to feel these emotions and experience them in healthy ways. That is where the healing is found. Our emotions are actually the GPS system leading us to where we need to go. They are not the thing to be run away from. They're actually one of our most helpful tools God's designed within our bodies.

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And we have to process these emotions. I mean, you can look at research about men. Men die younger, they have more heart attacks, they have more intestinal problems. All these things are due to unprocessed emotion that we just have learned as males to just stuff and not talk about. And so we really want to demonstrate today ways that you can talk about your feelings.

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And if it's okay with you guys, I want to take it even a level deeper

Feelings Check In With Needs

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to get down to needs as well.

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Oh, yeah, let's do it. Yep.

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One of my favorite quotes from Ashley Werner says, Beneath every behavior is a feeling. Beneath every feeling is a need. Yes. When we meet the need, rather than focus on the behavior, we are dealing with the cause, not the symptom. Yes. We are each going to share a feeling. And if we're up for the additional challenge, perhaps we can also talk about any needs that might be.

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Let's do it. No better place than a safe place. Right.

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So I've got my feelings pillow here, and this one that I have is divided into comfortable emotions and uncomfortable emotions. And as I share my feelings, I am going to use parts language. What do I mean by that? Well, feelings are parts of us, and I'm not just one feeling, so it can help to say part of me feels this way, part of me feels this way. That is a way of making space for these emotions so that they have somewhere to go. Okay, here we go. Part of me is actually feeling embarrassed because when we started recording this podcast and I I talked about sexualizing emotions, it felt like it was a little bit too technical or difficult to understand for an audience of teens, and part of me is feeling embarrassed about that. Another part of me is feeling very grateful and loved because Doug and Blake have so much grace and understanding for me. So I'm feeling embarrassed and grateful. And what do I need right now? If we were in person, I'd say I need a hug. We'll settle for a virtual hug. Virtual. Thanks, guys.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

Thanks for sharing that, Drew. And I think it's such a beautiful example of why we try to do this in community when we have access to it. To oftentimes our emotions are a fear of the reaction of the others, right? And so to be able to say that and to have some dear friends look you in the eye and say, hey, we are not embarrassed of you. I received that.

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Thank you.

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For me, how I'm feeling right now is um the first one would be grateful. Grateful that I'm here with two people that I really love and care about and respect and just think they have a wealth of knowledge. I'm I'm really grateful for this opportunity to spend time with both of you. And the need that that comes from is connection. I long for healthy male connection with people that are like-minded and that I can truly be myself around and relate to. The other one I think is a little bit of what Drew talked about. Um, instead of embarrassment, I feel some sense of anxiety. I tend to be a little technical, like research. I tend to throw out research in this podcast, you know, maybe be a little less practical sometimes. And so that makes me think am I really reaching the listener? So I have some anxiety. And underneath that is my need for purpose. I want to have purpose in my life. And I want what I do and what I communicate to people to be purposeful and to feel like I'm making a difference in someone's life. So those are my feelings, those are my needs.

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Thank you so much, Doug. And I love those things about you. I love the way that you were so easily able to get right to the need underneath those feelings.

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Yeah, I've tried to analyze through my whole life when I have a feeling, okay, like what's behind this feeling? Why am I feeling this way? Because sometimes my feelings don't make sense. Or I'll think, why do I feel this way? I don't understand. And I just have to take time and sit with myself and go deeper. Let's sit with that uncomfortable emotion. Where is this coming from? What's the root of it? What's the origin of it? And really get deeper about the why. And then I'm able to have a lot more compassion toward myself for my emotion.

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I love that. Compassion for yourself and your emotion. We have a tendency, even when we're picking up on an emotion, to minimize it or to try and shoe it away immediately of well, it's probably not that. That would be silly to feel, or I I don't I don't want to feel that. So it's it's probably nothing. And my counselor taught me this phrase of just saying there's probably a really good reason for why I'm feeling this. Yes. Just starting there. I might not even know what it is yet, but I recognize this idea. There's probably a really good reason for it, a valid and understandable reason. And so for me and my feelings, I like to do this with the feeling wheel too. Sometimes I track from the inside out, for example, I feel some lingering fear. So I start in that sense of the pie. And then I look at the next feelings and I see, you know, some anxiety makes sense. I think that's a bit of what I'm feeling. And then I look at the ones connected to that and I see overwhelmed. That that seems to really hit in my core. Of I feel a sense of overwhelm that I'm I'm not doing enough. You know, I can feel my chest almost tighten a little bit. Of it, if I don't do enough, then I don't have value or purpose. Right. And so the need I feel underneath that is this need, this desire to be, to be affirmed and to be blessed, right? To be blessed that I I am loved and I value no matter what work I put out into the world or effort and affirm too because I long to be affirmed in the things that I do work hard in, that I do celebrate and try. And I often struggle with those. And then the other one, I actually I was working from the outside in of I was in this category, I noticed feeling hesitant felt consistent to me. I was like, I'm noticing that. And hesitant if I go inwards, connected to avoidance. And I'm like, oh yeah, I I feel some avoidance around some things for sure. And avoidance is connected to disgust. And I was like, oh, I really don't like that one. And I liked her's language of it, that feels uncomfortable to me. And there's a lens in me that's prone to look with disgust at myself to try and prevent me from taking risks, from taking on uh things that I might find challenging or hard. And so it pushes this hesitant avoidance. And so from that I draw this need of similarly, but I I have a need maybe to just be heard and understood. And I think that same need that to to be blessed and to be affirmed in these things I'm going through. And and I'm also drawn to just the the relief and joy I feel that I feel so safe to share these things with without the angst or fear that we often can, because these are two really safe guys in front of me. And uh I I celebrate that uh the joy of having safe places to share emotions in healthy ways. And so thank you guys for that. Thank you for your vulnerability.

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Like, what's it like to share that right now?

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It just feels good. You know, I think oftentimes we might I'll say this for myself. I when I'm resistant to sharing my emotions, I there's such a fear of if I open that box, it'll it'll overflow and I'll I'll never get the cap back on it. And whenever I'm sharing, I'm I'm always surprised, even after all the times I've done it. I'm surprised at the just the deep breath it allows me to take of, oh wow, I shared that and everything didn't fall apart. It it actually felt good. It felt like the relief I desired, the the peace I was hoping for, and how counterintuitive that gets within our bodies and our spirits. But so right now I just I feel I feel happy. I feel let me use my feeling wheel. I feel um intimate, peaceful, accepted.

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Whew.

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It's beautiful.

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Guys, I feel so much more connected to both of you after doing that check-in.

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Yeah, Drew and I do groups, live groups with men, and oftentimes we'll say we've entered sacred space. And it feels like after men open up and share vulnerably and just be real with one another, it just creates such a beautiful sacred space and a peaceful, intimate feeling that is so nurturing to our needs.

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If you ever come to one of our retreats or healing weekends, we will get out the pillow multiple times a day and allow every single person to check in.

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Really learning to be attuned to yourself and to others.

Why Healing Is A Long Process

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Thought experiment if we could always process our feelings every single time, would we ever sexually act out?

SPEAKER_00 25:04

Ooh, I love this question. Wow. I really think my answer is no. Oh, I I agree. To the points we were saying earlier, uh my my mentor has a way of saying it of if it's all emotional energy and I have to take my emotional energy somewhere. If I don't take it to safe places, to healthy community, to ways to have it metabolized in healthy ways, it will get orgasmed out in some way, shape, or form often.

SPEAKER_02 25:38

Yeah, I feel the same way. There's a part of me, here's again, there's a part of me that is anxious to ask that question and to say, yeah, I I really think that processing our emotions is the way out of porn. Um, because I don't think it's that easy. It's not a simple magic formula, it's certainly not quick. This is a learning process. This is even harder than learning a musical instrument or a sport or a language because we're also unlearning the way that we've done feelings and emotions our entire lives.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

Oh, yes. Speaking of mentors who used to say that any addictive behavior is just liquid emotion. Like we are creating a chemical reaction in our head to balance out whatever we're feeling. So an addiction is just a liquid emotion that we're trying to bring homeostasis and balance to in our head. So if we take the time and attuned ourselves and understand our emotion and what our deeper need is, and then address that need, there's no reason that we have to then turn to an unhealthy or addictive type behavior to bring balance into our system.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

I love that idea. And what you were saying, Drew, of have this conversation with teens all the time of just understanding the process element of this. Because many teens can hear something like this and they're like, great, I'm just gonna process my emotions and I'm never gonna act out again. And to just recognize uh let's let's call it 15. What if if you're 15 in this journey, obviously many are younger, many are older, but you're 15, you've probably had close to eight years or five to eight years of this brain-connected struggle. You've got at least five years of history of operating in this way. And so it just makes sense that it's it's gonna take some time. Uh simple math, it doesn't actually look like this, but we probably need five years of processing emotions in healthy ways. And we're all here to tell you that we've we've been processing emotions for I don't know how long between the three of us, maybe 60 years, and we are still learning how to process our emotions in healthy ways. And so the journey never ends, and there's so much andness of I may be struggling, and I'm learning a lot emotionally, and that is really healthy and good for me and my journey.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

Yeah, emotions gr grow, they change over time, they can become intense, they can lessen. Like the age and learning doesn't have anything to do with the immediate reaction of an emotion, you know, but it's learning what to do with that, where to take it, how to heal it, how to tame it. You know, the that's a process of learning.

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Your feelings are not bad. No, even the urge to watch porn is not itself a problem. What matters is what we do with it. Yes, and that is freeing.

A Simple Path For Any Feeling

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And here's what you can do with any feeling that you have you can become aware of it, you can welcome it and have space for it. Like if you picture a table within your soul, there is a place for every feeling, and they're all allowed to exist. Even the ones that want to do things that would destroy your life, they can come to the table. That's hospitality instead of hostility, that's a sense of love instead of fear and shame. And then after you become aware of your emotions and you welcome your emotions, you can begin to understand and appreciate where is this feeling coming from? Yes, there's often a story behind it. And then lastly, you can regulate your emotions, whether through reaching out for support or solitude with God, going out in nature, therapy, groups, all kinds of ways that we can use our feelings to grow and bring them into places where we can actually get what we need.

Visual Tools Color Animals And Art

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That's what healing looks like.

SPEAKER_01 30:07

Drew, a couple other practical things I just want to throw out before we end is, you know, sometimes when I'm working with someone or in therapy, or sometimes I even do this by myself. If a person even using the feeling wheel is having a difficult time identifying your emotion, I will ask them, okay, assign a color to this emotion. If you could picture what color this emotion would be, whatever your emotion you're having, what color would it be? Then explore, okay, let's explore that color that you assign to that. What does that color represent to you? Or another way I'll do this is I'll okay, allow this emotion to take the form of an animal. Well, my emotion just took the form of a lion. Oh, tell me about your perception and your experience of lions. Like, and I wonder what emotion that that's representing. I know I know those may sound silly, but we are very visual, analytical people. And if we can take things and visualize them, we we can start to understand them a little more. So we can even do something really basic, even if the feeling pillow isn't working for you.

SPEAKER_02 31:18

And Doug is a master at this. I remember one time Doug asked me that question if your feeling was an animal, what would it be? I said, it would be a great white shark, and I am terrified. It was right when we were gonna start one of the very first retreats we did, and I was so overwhelmed. I was freaking out. I feel like there's this great white shark, and through that processing, in my own creative imagination, I realized that you know what? Sharks are not the top of the food chain. Orcas can kill sharks, and I'm an orca. Like it was so empowering. Yes, it was so strengthening. Like I was transformed by that simple experience of imagining my emotion as an animal. And one of my favorite questions that Doug taught me is if that feeling could talk, what would it say? So helpful, so powerful. There are lots of tools like this.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

If it could talk, and what does it want to do? Those are two things that can really give you some clues into what this emotion is.

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And then we can befriend it instead of battle it.

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Yes.

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We can work with it instead of against it.

SPEAKER_01 32:39

Art therapy is another wonderful way for you to access your emotion. If you just go get a piece of paper and some colored pins or a marker or something and just start allowing yourself to express whatever you're feeling onto the paper and see what form it becomes, see what colors you choose. You know, that's a way to start accessing your emotion. You know, and sometimes if people are really shut down on their emotions, we have to go about this in kind of tricky ways to just start opening that door of safety to be able to face our emotion.

God Welcomes Your Emotions

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One more thing as we close to just remember and think about that can really open up this process too is this idea that God is open to all of my emotions. Yes. We can often view God with this, well, he doesn't want to hear about my emotions, or he only wants the positive, the worshipful ones. And God is more attuned to our emotions than we are. He designed us and created us with emotions. They they were not a mistake. And so he longs to be with us in them. And we see so many experiences of Jesus experiencing his emotions in healthy ways. And so if you need a step one just to start with yourself and to start to say, Oh, my emotions are here and they are meant to be felt, and they are they are valid, and I am allowed to feel them, and God is here to feel them with me.

SPEAKER_01 34:12

Look through the Bible at how much emotion God has and all the different stories, and when he's angry, and when he's delighted, and I mean, we were created by a creator who's full of emotion.

SPEAKER_02 34:30

Amen. So you are not too emotional, amen. Name it to tame it, feel it to heal it. Check out some of our links in the show notes for more resources about how to process your emotions as you outgrow porn at any age.

SPEAKER_01 34:48

At any age, at any age.