IIC 55: Why Catholics Use Pornography

Our guest, Dr. Gerry Crete discusses with Dr. Peter the hidden, subtle, but powerful reasons why Catholic use porn, even when they don’t want to. Join us as we discuss what pornography means to some parts of those who use it, leading to internal conflicts. We also discuss how to get over the use of porn, the first steps.

Dr. Peter: [00:00:13] Welcome to the podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information, essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life. In this podcast, we confront the tough questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives. We confront head-on the struggles that we have in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us and those we love from fully loving our Lord and Our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way. And we deal with these difficult, demanding issues for one primary reason: to free us to love God our Father, Jesus our brother, the Holy Spirit, and our Mother Mary more and more over time. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration, to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God. Together, we are on a journey toward deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets, our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being, so that our souls can one day enter into contemplative union with God. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, and I am your host. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and our neighbor.

Dr. Peter: [00:01:40] This is episode 55. It’s released on February 15th, 2021. It’s the seventh episode in our series on sexuality, and it is the first one on pornography. It’s titled Why Catholics Use Pornography. Well, I am so excited to bring to the first time on this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, Dr. Gerry Crete. Now Dr. Gerry is a dear friend of mine. He is the co-founder of Souls and Hearts, which is the umbrella organization for this podcast and for the Resilient Catholics Community. He is a licensed marriage and family therapist in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the former president of the Catholic Psychotherapy Association. We could go on and on with the with the awards and the accolades for Dr. Gerry. Many of you already know him because he is the host of Be with the Word. And he also leads us in Hear the Word, these are podcasts from Souls and Hearts. There’s so many things that I could talk about with Dr. Gerry. I am so excited that you volunteered, that he got on the boards at Resilient Catholics. He volunteered to, like, be with us today on pornography, on this whole question of pornography. So welcome Dr. Gerry.

Dr. Gerry: [00:02:53] Thank you. Thank you very much.

Dr. Peter: [00:02:56] It is great to have you here. And this is one of the areas in which you’ve specialized. Right. I mean, you have actually spent a lot of your career working in this area.

Dr. Gerry: [00:03:07] Yeah. I have worked with pornography and sexual addictions pretty much for the last, I don’t know, 10, 12 years. And I’ve even run groups on those topics. So I’m working with men, especially men, dealing with pornography addictions and other sexual compulsive behaviors.

Dr. Peter: [00:03:24] Great. So you’re going to help us really understand this. Now, you know that we’ve been doing a series on masturbation. We just kind of wrapped that up. And there’s some connections there. Obviously, there’s some things that are similar between between the two, but let’s just kind of start with what people generally think of when they want to combat the use of pornography in their lives. What kinds of things come to mind for people that maybe get out there, internet, you know, look at it, practical steps, that kind of stuff.

Dr. Gerry: [00:03:54] Right. Well, a lot of people, rightly, turn to different kinds of device management software, whether that is to block pornography or whether it, you know, screens it out or even has an accountability system like Covenant Eyes, where you have a partner who receives your report and you have to like touch base with that person. So those are ways in which you can manage your devices. People have things on their televisions, right, and different things to basically filter out inappropriate sexual content that would be either triggering itself, that might lead to, you know, pornography use or masturbation, or that would at least just be disturbing for a person who is trying to really work on their own chastity, work on their own sexual health. So there are a lot of things out there that one can do to manage it. And there are apps. There’s support type apps like Strive or Our Tribe or there’s just different ones that are out there to provide some kind of device management or accountability. And some people do it very organically. Some people have just a buddy, right, that they talk to and they meet up with, like an accountability partner, right? Or for some people, they’re married, right? It might be their spouse, but I typically veer away from that and try to encourage people to find, if it’s a man, other men to hold them accountable. People turn to different support groups as well and different ways to get tangible, systemic support to make a change.

Dr. Peter: [00:05:40] But this is sounding pretty external to me right now though, right? Especially when you’re talking about the apps and so forth. You’re talking about accountability. Okay, so I’m accountable to somebody outside of me, the support group. Again, you know, that’s a system that’s outside of me. So, you know, I’m a depth psychologist. I’m all focused on intrapsychic stuff. So tell me a little bit about like what you would think of in terms of like inner work when you’re, because I’m assuming that, you know, as wonderful as Covenant Eyes is, I’ve heard great things about it. I know you’ve recommended it in the past. As wonderful as some of these other resources are, well, let me ask, is that going to be the answer? I have a skeptical part of me that says, I don’t know, you know.

Dr. Gerry: [00:06:25] I’m with you. I see that there needs to be a two-pronged approach. I think that there is some just behavior management that needs to happen, especially when it comes to an addiction. So in other words, if you’re like an alcoholic, you simply can’t have alcohol in your house. You simply should not go into a bar. You simply have to have a plan in place for certain social occasions, especially at the beginning when you’re just starting out in recovery. So it would be the same thing with pornography, whether it’s full-blown addiction or whether it’s just a problem, you know, recurring problem, but nevertheless, having some behavior modification, environmental changes in place, like maybe it’s things like, hey, we have a rule where we leave the phone, all of our phones are in the kitchen at 8 p.m. and onwards or something like that. And everyone does it. So there’s those kinds of things. But what you’re getting at is the second prong. And that is really getting at the root, where does this problem come from? You know, where did it start? What’s going on? How was this behavior, at one time, an answer to something profoundly important to the person? And when you get at that and you’re starting to do the inner work, right. You’re starting to explore where those needs come from, why they’re there, and so on. Sometimes you can’t get there or aren’t willing to do that kind of inner work, either, say with therapy, before you’ve done, maybe you’ve gone to a support group or you know, where you start to realize, oh, hey, other people struggle with this, I’m not alone. Or whatever. Things that will help combat the initial shame that might prevent a person from going deeper, even if they’re at a point where they’re in therapy.

Dr. Peter: [00:08:26] Right. So you’re saying that the pornography is not the only problem. That there’s something deeper going on here.

Dr. Gerry: [00:08:38] Absolutely. And I think that corresponds really well with everything that you’ve been going over in the masturbation sections, is sometimes what we think of as the problem isn’t really the problem per se. One way that I would look at this is to say, it’s a particular combination or a cocktail of things that are coming together at the same time. And one of those is simply the material itself. So the material itself is working on the brain in a very specific way. In other words, our brains, let’s just say. I’m going to focus on men for this, although women also struggle with pornography and pornography addictions at times, and it’s a little bit different and similar. But if I just look at men, our brains are hardwired to notice another person like a female who’s attractive. There are certain things that are just hardwired in, visually. And so there is a biological response if one views certain pornographic material. So there’s something there that’s just biological. But that alone doesn’t usually result in an addiction by itself. Right? What comes at it that’s really important that’s added to it is the fact that the response or the stimulus, whatever one receives, is meeting some kind of unmet need. So in other words, if I have an unmet need that is related to, say, attachment. Right. I have some kind of attachment injury. Maybe it’s, you know, in childhood, it could easily be and often is, it’s some kind of childhood injury or loss or neglect or trauma, what have you. But there’s an unmet need. So if my unmet need is to be seen. Right. And if that’s my unmet need, then I am going to look for something. And I’m not necessarily even conscious, right, that I’m even doing this, but I’m going to be looking for something that helps me feel seen. And so if that is a, I don’t know, like a chat room or something, where all of a sudden I feel like somebody is noticing me and seeing me and interested in me and wants more of me, somehow, even if it’s an illusion. Right, if it’s a video of somebody saying how much they want to be with you sexually or whatever, that that combined with the biological natural piece, creates a little cocktail that says, whoa, I got a physical hit, but I also have a deeper emotional hit that says, man, my need is met here. Even though it’s an illusion, there’s a dopamine release. The brain responds in its own way. And it basically, the brain remembers now, when I do that behavior, I physically feel good and I get that need met. That’s a powerful drug.

Dr. Peter: [00:11:49] And that’s a lot more than lust. I mean, what I’m hearing you say is that this is much more than the vice of lust.

Dr. Gerry: [00:11:55] Yeah, I find lust is an interesting word and I could even spend time on that word. Because I honestly, I’m going to use an example here, in the Bible in the Old Testament, like David. When he was lusting after Bathsheba, when he was lusting after her, she was married to, I think it was Uriah. And so he wanted her. Okay. And he even did an action to put Uriah in danger, to get killed, so that he could have her. So I think that’s really different than simply seeing, say, a beautiful woman and having a sexual response. And I think sometimes people mistake those, because I don’t call it lust that you had a response. I think that’s human. Whereas, and maybe we’ve got to manage that a little bit, don’t put yourself in the position where you’re having that response constantly. But you can’t avoid it, especially in our world. But the difference is if you’re David and you lust after her, then there’s an obsessive thinking, I have to have her. Why? I don’t know that we know what his unmet needs fully were. It would be an interesting thing to explore and look at. But that he was willing to take actions, to lust, to have her, to possess her, right. He was willing to take actions to possess her, to meet his own unmet needs. Right? And that is lust. And so, to differentiate. So if a person is looking at pornography or behaving and acting out in some sexual way, then it’s taking actions to possess something to meet one’s need. Right. It’s not just, oh, I noticed that, you know, jogger walking by. That alone isn’t, in my mind anyway, quite the same as what we’re talking about here.

Dr. Peter: [00:14:05] Right. So there’s a distinction in philosophy between the first moral act or the first act, and the second act. And the first act is that sort of spontaneous, you know, it’s not bidden by the will. It’s not under the control of the will and the intellect. The moral comes in, the moral aspects come in, in the second act, where you take some kind of action or there’s some kind of omission, right? So, you know, the experience like you’re talking about of the stuff that’s hardwired. We see a beautiful woman. You know, there’s an immediate response. It’s what we do with that that would make the difference morally.

Dr. Gerry: [00:14:40] I love that. I think it would be worth exploring that some more. Because I wonder if there isn’t a few other steps in between that are somewhat unconscious. Right?

Dr. Peter: [00:14:50] Oh, yeah. I mean, there are a lot of this is unconscious, a lot of this is unconscious. And I think it’s great that you use the example of King David and Bathsheba, because I got into that in episode 42 in a lot of detail. I actually argue that a lot of it had to do with his shame. Now that’s speculative, right? I don’t, you know, King David didn’t come to my office, you know, and we didn’t explore this together or anything. But yeah, I mean, I think that’s really important because people come in all the time and they need like formation of conscience around these things because they feel terrible. They feel really guilty. Parts of them are really reacting to the idea that they even have an image pop up or a memory pop up or things like that. And there can be a lot of shaming, a lot of guilt around these things that are not actually sinful.

Dr. Gerry: [00:15:37] Right. So let me say this too. When a person sees another person and it’s more about lust, more about I have to possess that person, even if it’s a casual thing. There’s a difference between that biological response I was talking about, and I have to have that. And I have to have that, which feels kind of almost like an instinct, is a dead giveaway for an unmet need. Right. And so that is usually, like we were saying, is unconscious. It’s just kind of happening. And then if it’s like, oh, I don’t know, I’m attracted to older women. And my unmet need has something to do with my mother or what have you. Well, the person might, before anything else, as this thought comes to their mind, be pretty quick to, I’m bad, right? That was disgusting, or why did, you know, the shame. And they go so fast to the shame around it that they never stop to spend any time with the unconscious reactions and unmet needs. And so a lot of interior work that I’m focused on is about, in a non-judgmental way and in accepting way, to be able to discover what’s really going on. And maybe meeting that unmet need in a healthy way and getting a little bit of personal distance in a sense, from, as you might know where I’m going with parts work, getting some distance from that part that wants that need met, but doesn’t know how to do it in a healthy way. Right.

Dr. Peter: [00:17:21] Right. So we’re not denying the need. The need in itself isn’t bad. Right. The need is, and it’s actually good that we’ve got a clue or a cue to let us know what that need is so that that need could be met, right? Because that need’s legitimate. The need for the love of a mother, or the need for security, or the need to be seen and known, or whatever the need is. That’s something that’s really important for us not to, yeah. Because I think a lot of times people try to just deny the need, right? Just try to get rid of the need.

Dr. Gerry: [00:17:59] Exactly, exactly. And here’s the thing. One of the first things that needs to happen, let’s say the guy, it’s a guy and he’s married, right? Has a family, but has a problem with pornography. Okay. So let’s say that’s the situation. One of the first things that he needs to do, though, in order to recover, is to recognize that pornography has had a negative effect on his life. Right? So he needs to be able to recognize, hey, this is taking my time and energy even away from my wife, away from my family duties, maybe even my career, depending how much time I’m spending on it. I’m not actually, in my downtime, I’m not actually getting refreshed. Instead, I’m mired with this behavior. My spiritual life is affected. There’s all these things that the person needs to recognize. However, that itself might feel intolerable and induce a shame in the person. Right? Oh my gosh, look at that. I’ve been wasting my life. I’m horrible. I’m a terrible person and I’m a terrible husband. And all these things could easily kick in. And yet if you don’t take stock in that, it becomes a difficult thing to actually take action to commit to a change. So there’s, at the very beginning, there’s a really difficult loop there that needs to be overcome.

Dr. Gerry: [00:19:33] And that’s why support groups are actually important because you can stay locked in that little cycle in your own head, and that can prevent you from taking any kind of action. And if you go to a support group, whether it’s at a sexaholics anonymous or some other type of support group with other people there also, or you have friends. Whatever you do, you realize, hey, I’m not alone in this, right? And that I have to do two things kind of at once, which are really hard. I have to own it and own the negative impact, but I also have to be gentle, kind, and understanding to myself. And as we would put it here, to our parts. And that’s a hard thing to do at once. And I feel like a therapist can help somebody possibly do that. Right. And to be able to regulate the shame, help regulate and overcome the shame response, while at the same time, show love and kindness and compassion and help the person learn how to give that to themselves.

Dr. Peter: [00:20:46] Right. Now what really makes that hard though? Let’s get into the nitty gritty of this. You said it’s hard. I’ve got some ideas, obviously, but what makes it hard to do those two things simultaneously? Right, on the one hand, acknowledge the impact, the negative impact of pornography and on the other hand, be kind and gentle to oneself. Why is it so difficult to do those two things at once, do you think?

Dr. Gerry: [00:21:11] Well, I would see that as, and I think you would too, right, as competing parts. There’s a part, it may be a religious part or maybe it’s just a moralizing part of some kind. Let’s just say for the purpose of, you know, our audience, many of whom are Catholic, that it might be a very good Catholic religious part that cannot tolerate the existence of this problem, cannot tolerate the part that is acting out with pornography. Right. And so that part puts up a lot of resistance, and maybe even that resistance causes various parts to kind of shrink and just be overwhelmed and burdened with shame.

Dr. Peter: [00:21:59] Yeah. I mean, I have seen parts where, you know, maybe shaming worked, in the short run, to ward off some of this behavior. Maybe it was seen at one point as adaptive, you know, to shame to try to inhibit the behavior, right? Because shame has an inhibiting effect. But in the long run, shame, shame, shame, shame, all that shame piles up and it becomes a burden of its own that becomes unbearable. And you get, you know, pushback in the person’s system. Other parts are like coming up and reacting against that.

Dr. Gerry: [00:22:34] Yeah. So in a way, those protectors need to get addressed. They need to be understood. You know, in Internal Family Systems, they need to, whatever their burdens might be, might need to be relieved. All that needs to happen for any opportunity to actually approach the part that is struggling, right, to actually get any insight into why, to ever be able to access and figure out what those unmet needs are. Because when I look at guys, for example, who are looking at pornography, I’m interested to know about their fantasy life. I’m interested to know why that, right? Because there’s so many options out there. If you go looking, googling, there’s options, right? But out of a million, 10 million options, they picked that one. And that one reveals what their unmet need is. Right. It’s that old, you know, every man who enters a brothel is seeking the face of God. Every man that looks at pornography is looking to have an unmet need met. And so, if it’s the dynamic is about being seen is one thing. Is it about being allowed in to see? Right. Is it some kind of, I feel like I have no power or agency in my own life, but in that fantasy, I’m powerful and strong and people want me, you know? So it’s really important to get at what that is. And if you’re doing, also, if there’s trauma, right, there might be small “t” or large “T” kinds of traumas. But certainly if there’s trauma, then that gets revealed in the process of exploring. But there may be parts, like we were saying, protective parts who don’t want that trauma revealed.

Dr. Peter: [00:24:34] Right? So there’s a part. So what you’re saying is that there’s a part that looks at the pornography as the answer. Right. When that when that part takes over, when it blends, when it’s now driving the bus, when it is in charge, that part’s going to have these impulses to look at pornography because it believes that actually that’s going to meet the need. It’s trying to survive. It’s trying to become whole, but it’s using means that are just, yeah, that are really morally problematic and destructive in a lot of ways. And then there’s other parts that are fighting that part, that are polarized with that part, that are battling. Okay.

Dr. Gerry: [00:25:15] Exactly, exactly. And the thing about it that I was saying at the beginning was there’s a physical response as well as an emotional response. And those are the most powerful because your body feels whoa, in arousal, right, physical arousal. And then the emotional piece says, you’re wanted or some other thing. And guess what we do, right? If we’re trying to fight this, we don’t want to be doing this behavior, we intellectualize the problem. So we spend a lot of time figuring out this or that or analyzing it. And that’s the part of the brain that isn’t as engaged in any of it. Right?

Dr. Peter: [00:25:58] It’s sort of offline. It actually kind of goes offline after a certain point.

Dr. Gerry: [00:26:02] Yeah. And some of those thoughts, once we figure it out, induce shame, and why, like, I know all this truth and yet I still do this. What the heck is wrong with me? What’s wrong? I’m not a good Catholic then, or I’m not a good person. I’m not a good husband. It leads us back into that whole shame thing. So we’ve got to be able to, whether that’s a rational part or just, we’ve got to be able to stay in the body and in the emotional center primary. Those have to be attended to.

Dr. Peter: [00:26:36] Right. So you’re not just going to study your way out of this. You’re not just going to conceptually, intellectually, rationally overcome this, is what I’m hearing you say.

Dr. Gerry: [00:26:46] Exactly. And yet we, you know, and a lot of guys like, that’s what we want to do. We’re not comfortable with our emotions. We’re not comfortable even recognizing what’s going on in our bodies. Right? We don’t even notice that stuff. So it’s a big learning curve. It’s hard work to recover from an addiction or a problem behavior. But I do think if you can get to a place where you can take responsibility and say, yes, this has had a negative effect in my relationships, my family, my job, my relationship with God, all of that. So I get to a place where it’s like, I can’t tolerate that anymore. It’s just not, this is not working. But I can come and approach that. And while still having responsibility for it, approach it and say, I need to understand. I need to be gentle and compassionate and curious about the self, right, and about this problem. Are there parts of me that feel that I have to do this? Right, that are held to it, because they are engaged with or tied to the symptom. So whatever it is, like watching pornography is the symptom. There’s a part of me that believes I have to maintain that, I have to have that in order to survive. In order to have any of my needs met, I have to do that behavior. Now, of course, intellectually we know, hey, that can’t be right. But that part believes it at a core level.

Dr. Gerry: [00:28:40] And that’s probably because that part is actually young. It’s not a mature adult with full, rational mental capacities. It’s a young part. It’s a kid. It’s like a kid who just, you know, discovered his father’s Playboys, or it’s a kid who is a homeschooler and he’s in his basement, and he discovers the internet and he sees something and he’s aroused by it, and now he doesn’t know what to do with that. Right? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t really even understand his own unmet needs. Right. So he’s at a loss. He needs something different. And so when we meet that, we meet that kid within ourselves and we meet him with compassion and we want to understand him. Right. So at this point, the shaming and everything else is over to the side, right? Or the parts of us that want to shame him or have trouble, they’re relaxed, or they’re at least willing to allow this process to happen. Then this kid, we have the opportunity to really meet him. And when we do, he’s almost certainly, any times I’ve worked with this, is almost certainly he is lovable.

Dr. Gerry: [00:29:59] We see him with whole new eyes and it’s like it becomes really clear, all those unmet needs. Buddy, you just needed someone to hold you or you just needed somebody to tell you you’re good. But here’s some help with this. You know, he needs something. But when we see a 12-year-old, somebody else’s 12-year-old, if it was our own kid, we would know exactly what to do. But we don’t, for some reason, because we’re protected because of all this, we don’t easily do it for ourselves.

Dr. Peter: [00:30:29] Right. So a lot of this is not even about sex. A lot of this can go back to like way before puberty, way before, you know, we were sexually developed and so forth. But when we hit puberty or the pornography got involved in some way in all that hardwiring, especially, you know, like it got sexualized. Yeah. Right, so we’re actually thinking that a lot of times, and this has been my experience as a clinician too. You take it back and it’s like early stuff, you know, that isn’t particularly sexual necessarily, right? If it’s emotional neglect or a need for mom’s attention or things like that that we’re finding. It may not be, it may be sexualized, right? If there’s sexual abuse, that obviously can, you know, can start much, much earlier.

Dr. Gerry: [00:31:22] Yeah. This is such a great topic. I think it’s interesting. I once, many years ago, we’ll go back to the 90s, I taught English. And what’s interesting in literature is that whenever there’s a scene that actually has fairly overt sex, it’s not about sex, and the other scenes that don’t have any sex, it’s all about sex, right? Like, it’s not what it seems. But what that says to me is that our issues, our needs, our dynamics, whatever it is, is played out within a sexual context, right? And if it’s a traumatic reenactment, so in other words, if you were, say, sexually abused and then you do behavior that is sexual, it may mimic the abuse experience, which makes no sense to the survivor most of the time. They don’t know why. Why am I doing the same things? Or why am I looking at pornography where somebody is being debased or demeaned in some way? Why would I even do that? Like, why am I attracted to that? Doesn’t even make sense. Well, the problem is, they don’t really want that. Well, that’s not the problem. That’s the reality. They don’t want that, right. But why then are they continually going to that, is that it is the brain in some way wanting to resolve that problem. Right. Say it was abuse, they want a different ending or they want to gain some kind of control that they didn’t have or something is being played out that’s unresolved. And almost invariably, when you actually do the trauma work, the early childhood trauma work, the sexual compulsion resolves itself.

Dr. Peter: [00:33:13] All right. So you’re saying, and this is what we talked about in the masturbation series. If you get to the causes, the symptoms will resolve, right? Like if you get to the causes, you can expect the symptoms to resolve.

Dr. Gerry: [00:33:25] I believe that strongly. Now, I think that needs to be coupled with what we were talking about at the beginning, with some environmental and behavioral aspects. Right. Because some things do become habit. Some things are easy to fall back into, just because we’ve conditioned ourselves. But that’s why you need both. Because if you neglect, if you neglect this stuff, we’re talking about, the inner work, then you might be a really strong-willed person and be able to put all the behavior modifications in place and actually get success for a period of time and then bang, some kind of emotional crack happens, some difficulty, and everything falls apart and you’re right back to where you were and you’re like, why? Right. Conversely, you can do a lot of inner work, and I do believe a lot of that will resolve. But if your environment is not safe, then you’re putting yourself at risk of undoing some of that progress.

Dr. Peter: [00:34:26] Yeah, yeah. So yeah, we’re talking about a holistic approach and we’re talking about that interior integration, which is what this podcast is all about. It’s about bringing these parts together. It’s about understanding the self. And ultimately it’s about loving the self in an ordered way, right? And that’s what you’re really talking about when we’re talking about this kindness, this gentleness, this understanding, right? This, you know, space to be able to connect with our parts and not just to judge or not just to condemn or not just to, you know, otherwise kind of go back to the old patterns that actually didn’t solve it for us, right? Otherwise we wouldn’t be in the place that we’re at.

Dr. Gerry: [00:35:09] Yeah. And so one of the first hurdles is loving the part of ourselves that is doing the problem behavior. So if it’s pornography, it’s about loving the part of myself that is looking at pornography, which seems counterintuitive. And there might be a religious part that’s going, what? How do you love that guy? He just needs to get on his knees and go to confession and he does perhaps need that. But he needs more than that. He needs to be loved first and understood.

Dr. Peter: [00:35:40] When I think about the way our Lord handled situations where there was sexual sin, right? The woman caught in the act of adultery. Right? “Neither do I condemn you.” So he didn’t condemn the woman and he said, “Go and sin no more.” Right. So there’s that balance. But the woman at the well, right, with five husbands. Gentleness, chose her to be the messenger to the whole town, to the whole community. Right. So there’s this incredible gentleness from our Lord when it comes to these sexual sins, right, these sexual issues.

Dr. Gerry: [00:36:17] Yeah, yeah. He’s very compassionate. Right. And to the woman being stoned, he actually calls everyone else to conscience, in order to, you know, show her love. But it is sometimes that intuitive action on Christ’s part that calls the person to conscience as well, that motivates a change. So again, whether it’s the woman at the well or the woman being stoned or whatnot, they are having to take responsibility for their actions while also receiving compassion and kindness. And that has to have, both of those have to happen. Right. Because you can’t have somebody just be compassionate, but not take responsibility for its effects. And you can’t only be focused on consequences and never have compassion. So I think it’s a two pronged thing, in order to get closer and to find out what it is. Right. What I have found over and over again that is the unmet need is usually based in attachment injuries.

Dr. Peter: [00:37:24] So when you say attachment, let’s just kind of unpack that a little bit because not everybody may be familiar with that.

Dr. Gerry: [00:37:31] Right. So really, if you go back all the way to babyhood, when you’re a baby, you have a nonverbal attachment to your caregiver, typically the mother.

Dr. Peter: [00:37:44] Like a bond.

Dr. Gerry: [00:37:45] Yeah, a bond. And we talk about the maternal gaze. So the idea that the baby is looking intently at the mother, into her eyes, and the mother into the baby. There’s this nonverbal, beautiful, and powerful being seen, right? Being seen and then seeing into the other. So there’s a mutual, powerful intimacy that happens early, early on. And so if that’s interrupted early on, it causes a lot of damage. There’s a lot of damage if that’s simply interrupted. And so we see it creates insecurities in individuals. But for a lot of us, that might not be the case that it happens in young infancy. It might happen a little bit later in life where you feel generally safe and secure, but then something happens that disrupts that. It could be something natural, like a move or like something that happens in the environment, like a war or a loss of income or a parent that becomes depressed or hurt in some way or a loss, somebody dies. It could be all these kinds of things in the environment. It could be very relational. It could be a parent who snaps, who’s angry, or, you know, in some way causes the child to feel unsafe. And then all of a sudden, the child has a sense that my world isn’t what I thought it was. I’m not very secure. What do I have to do? And so the doing becomes some kind of safety mechanism, some kind of adaptation. And so that child learns, I have to hide. I have to withdraw. Or, you know, I have to get louder and be seen in order to, you know, whatever that adaptation is, if it’s based out of an insecurity, right? Then it’s the result of an attachment injury of some kind, but it’s a pattern of behavior for the future.

Dr. Peter: [00:39:54] And it doesn’t mean that the parents have to have any malice. I mean, you could have like, difficulties with that just because mom’s got postpartum depression, right, for example. Or, you know, dad, I mean, my father, for example, the day after I was born, had to ship out for a tour of duty in Vietnam. And I didn’t see him for six months. Right. So there’s a kind of loss there, right? And those kinds of things. So it doesn’t have to be because the parents were “bad parents” or something like that.

Dr. Gerry: [00:40:24] Right. And in fact, a lot of parents, I think most parents are not actually acting out of malice most of the time. There might be some. They’re working through their own brokenness and their own maladaptations. Right. And it’s much later on when we become adults and have children, we realize that about our own parents. So yeah, this isn’t about blaming Mom and Dad, really. It’s not a very helpful thing to do that. It’s just about, you know, reflecting on our humanity, our parents’ humanity, and coming to it with a level of understanding. That’s our goal is to understand. And so when we understand that some injury has happened, right, then part of the therapy becomes, how can I give that part what it needs in a healthy way to have perhaps an emotionally corrective experience? So that part now can attach in healthier ways. And once that happens, and then we return to the part that’s acting out, say with pornography, all of a sudden something happens and the person is able to go, oh, this is what I really need.

Dr. Peter: [00:41:42] This is what I really need. This is actually, this is a whole. So now we’re at that juncture. I’m a little mindful of the time here. And we’re at that juncture where we start getting into what does therapy look like, right? I mean, getting into, okay, so what does therapy look like? And what does recovery look like? Because this doesn’t just happen in therapy. This happens, you know, in other contexts as well. And I am super excited. So I’m going to ask you, will you come back, dear Dr. Gerry? All right. Excellent, excellent. Now, I want people to know that you actually have a whole course on this at Souls and Hearts. Right. You have the Be True course. And that is all about the discovery of pornography in a marriage. Right. And what happens then? How do you manage it then? And what’s amazing about this course to me is that it’s for the husband and the wife, if they want to do it together. Or it could be for either of them if the partner’s not on board.

Dr. Gerry: [00:42:49] Correct. Yeah. It’s ideally suited for a couple. And I don’t know that there’s anything else like it. There’s a lot of programs for husbands, let’s say, not so much for the wife. There are some maybe. This one really looks at both. Of course, you could do it on your own if you want to. You’ll learn a lot. But there’s a lot of help with overcoming pornography, but there’s also a marriage approach. It’s an approach on how to improve the marriage, because what tends to happen in marriages is that we play out the negative, insecure attachment cycles with each other. And then we turn to the pornography or whatnot as a way to feel some kind of connection or to meet those needs. So what really helps for a couple is for them to start being real conscious about how to meet each other’s attachment needs in healthy, non-codependent but healthy, loving, connected, intimate ways that have an effect of reducing the need to act out with pornography or any other negative behavior.

Dr. Peter: [00:44:02] Okay. So kind of getting again to those root causes and clearing up the misunderstandings because there’s so much misunderstanding in marriages about this stuff. There’s so many times, for example, I’ve had women who are clients, wives of men, for example, who have used pornography, and they feel terrible about themselves. They take in all kinds of messages, how they construe that. And this is a way for them to be included in that whole process as well. It’s a beautiful thing if both the husband and the wife can unite around something like that too. That’s really something. So I am super excited that we’re going to be able to do this again. So we will continue with this in our next episode. We’re going to get into, in that episode, what does recovery look like? What does the path look like when somebody is, you know, getting out of this? And it’s more than just not looking at pornography anymore. It’s not just the behavioral aspect of this. But you’re going to argue, I’m sure, that there’s an emotional aspect to this. There’s an attachment aspect to this. There’s a relational aspect to this, and maybe there’s a biological aspect to this. So I’m super excited to get your take on that. I am learning along with the rest of you, because like I said, Dr. Gerry is an expert in this, been a big focus of his career. And so we will be back with that. To wrap this up, Dr. Gerry, let’s do this together. We’ll invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.