Positive Always Beats Negative

You’re disgusting! Quit it! There, does that help? No, probably not.

The particularly difficult thing about getting out of the rut of obsessive fantasy thoughts and compulsive sexual activity (like masturbation) is that feeling bad about it tends to fuel the whole thing. Masturbation, as pleasurable as it is, is a misuse of the body—or at least a less than optimum use. When you feel like crap, you accept that you should be treated like crap. I imagine that a lot of prostitution customers, men who crave the thrill of a professional orgasm, don’t see themselves as girlfriend-worthy at the moment.

So negativity helps speed up the cycle of temptation. But if unwanted thoughts and desires are what lead you into obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors, how do you stop them without just yelling “No!” to your inner self all the time. Well, here’s a thought. Make all those condemnations positive. Instead of “Man, that’s a hot chick. Stop it, you jerk! Don’t think about her body!” think, “Man, that’s a hot chick. Yes, but it’s a real person who owns that body and may God bless how she chooses to use it. I choose right now to protect her privacy and respect her in my head.” See what I did there? I focused on things that are true or should be, not on what shouldn’t be. It’s just like a dieter choosing to be passionate about fresh, healthy vegetable dishes and enjoying improved scale readings instead of focusing on the pain of exercising longer or the deprivation of jumbo desserts.

Look, our brains didn’t get wired overnight. A lot of it is driven by tendencies that are permanent. I strongly believe, though, that through practice and positive reinforcement, we can coax our thought patterns to tend toward healthy thoughts and blow off destructive ones. And, let’s face it, obsessive sexual thoughts and fantasies are destructive. To give yourself completely to that cycle of temptation is to gleefully dive into a tailspin.

Be healthy. Think about what you think. If there’s problems there, think about adding thoughts, not subtracting them. If your timing is well chosen, the good thoughts will beat the bad. Brains work that way.

Save the Naked Girl!

The practical problems of obsessions with pornography and sexual fantasy are that they don’t respect boundaries. I can’t tell them to stick to a schedule or location. Unfortunately, this means that, despite my best intentions, I find myself in the “real world”, far away from my designated safe place to surf porn, daydream, and masturbate when the thoughts that serve me so well in fueling my masturbation fantasies arrive to pick on some REAL person I that I absolutely did not intend to interact, or worse, I fantasize about someone I know well and have to be around. Surely you know how weird and awful it can feel when you’ve seen someone and find yourself imagining them in some unspecified nudist situation, and then they make eye contact. Aren’t you certain at that point that your thoughts are transparent? Don’t you expect a dirty look?

Circuit Breakers for Unwanted Sexual Thoughts

Thinking about sex is definitely not bad. The problem for me has been that I have had a lot of sexual thoughts that weren’t by choice. They came to me by habit.

I call them circuit breakers. That’s because I think of these habitual thoughts as bad brain circuits (mind you, it’s not my brain that’s defective, it’s the habits that have been programmed into it).

Consider this scenario: I see a person who fits a character type in my library of sexual fantasies and I essentially own that person while I imagine them in my fantasy scenario. Can we agree that that’s not always a thought you want to have?

Consider another scenario: You’re flipping through channels and see a movie advertised. It’s a sex comedy and just that fact makes you ponder things about sex comedies and how far one on a particular network might go.