Why Only Stopping The Behavior Is Not Enough

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]In the first book that I wrote, it was a book titled Unwanted. And what we looked at was we did a lot of research to kind of say, you know, not so much how do we stop people from looking at porn or, you know, pursuing infidelity, but we really looked at what were the key drivers that were influencing people to pursue it.

[00:00:22]So, one of the counterintuitive things that we did in that original research study was we didn't just ask people how many affairs they had had, how much porn that they were watching. We actually asked for some of the specifics of their fantasies. Like we asked them, you know, what do you actually put into Google when you go to a porn site? What do you actually look at? Or when you are pursuing uh an affair partner, is that someone that is close to you? Is that someone that's anonymous? And part of what we found in that research is that the sexual fantasies that people have are not random at all. They were a direct reflection of the parts of their story that had not been addressed. And so for a lot of us whenever we come up to that notion of unwanted sexual behavior or sexual brokenness or infidelity uh we are usually pretty quick to just kind of uh you know pathize that this is something that is bad. We just need to get rid of it. We need to stop it. But if you've been, you know, trying to stop this type of behavior for years or decades and you're still having the same conversation with your accountability partner after 15 years, I think we have to grapple with this notion that like stop it and don't do it is not an adequate paradigm for recovery. And so part of what we began to see was that unwanted sexual behavior is not this life sentence to sexual addiction. It's not a life sentence to shame.