Why Relapse to Addiction Is So Common
We wanna welcome you back to the grounded union podcast. We are on season two, episode five. We're gonna be talking about why relapse to addiction is so common. This was something that became a very important topic for us as we were seeking to heal at the root level. And after already facing five years of relapse, of addiction, of going back and forth, of playing the toxic cycle, a lot of you guys have been on the roller coaster.
Brandon:Caitlyn has said before, this is a roller coaster. She did not want to stay riding. For a lot of you, you've been willing to face the aftermath of addiction once, and you don't wanna have to keep doing it. So we're gonna talk about why we think relapse to addiction is so common and what you can do to ensure that it does not happen ever again. For those of you that are new to the podcast, thank you for being here.
Brandon:We also have the video version on Spotify and YouTube. If you're not watching on one of those platforms. Or if you're just listening, we're happy to be in your ears and here to support you. If you're looking for where to start, our two main offerings that we have is is my men's community app called Grounded Nation. You can check the show notes for a link to try it out.
Brandon:I do weekly coaching there and offer courses for men to be able to take ownership and begin to rebuild trust. We also have our couples program, which is called grounded intimacy. If you're working through addiction, broken trust, the things we talk about on this podcast, we also have that offering for those of you that would like to go deeper. Those are the two best places to start. One, if you're a man, two, if you are a couple ready to work on it together.
Brandon:Those are all in the show notes, and we would love to hear from you. So let's set the stage for addiction and relapse. Before we went through the process we went through in 2019 and 2020 and onto today, my protocol for healing from addiction, from the havoc that was happening in our relationship was I would get caught lying. It was never forthright. Caitlyn always had to come to me like, Hey, are you going back to those websites again?
Brandon:And I would say, no, She's like, I feel like you're lying to me. Yes, I'm lying to you. So then I would cry, have this big emotional release, tell Caitlyn I was sorry, I wouldn't do it again. I would commit to going to a counselor too. I would read a book.
Brandon:I would tell some of the other guys in my accountability group what I was struggling with. And then six months to a year later, we'd find ourselves in the same spot. You maybe been through that with gambling, alcohol, tobacco, pornography, workaholism, or your relationship just continues to go in these ups and down cycles and you're ready for the, to heal at the root level. So how can two people who are committing to healing and the person that stepped out of addiction step back into it so easily? For me, happened was I never got to the root.
Brandon:I thought that and I knew there was more, but nobody could give me a language to it. That's why we get so specific on these specific behaviors and what we define as freedom. Because for me, I had stopped looking at pornography, hardcore pornography once we got married. That's right. So you might be thinking, well, well, then you don't understand my pain.
Brandon:We're not here to compare our pain to your pain. We're saying everybody's pain is valid and everybody's story is completely unique. For us, I had to weave my addictions in my behaviors to fit in my good little boy box because I was in ministry and I knew that looking at hardcore porn was off the table. So relapse for me, wasn't going to have sex with a prostitute again. For me, it was finding new ways to repeat the same behaviors.
Brandon:Relapse is finding a new way to repeat the same behavior. So you might just change shape a little bit. For me, I continue going back to swimsuit models, provocative Instagram accounts, and even just scrolling on the, for you page, the explore page, and hoping to see something that was inappropriate and feel like a victim as though I hadn't searched it out. Is that really any different than searching for a website for fully nude porn and going to that or using a texting app and texting somebody from another country, doing doing whatever, whatever flavor your addiction is, it's all relapse. And for me, I kept saying, okay, at least I'm not doing the bad stuff.
Brandon:But I knew a few months later that I was going back into the same path that I was just in. We're here again, lying to my wife, still objectifying women on the internet and in person, still stuck, still addicted, and it was back. And I felt more and more depleted, more and more discouraged every time we got back to that same point in the journey.
Caitlyn:Mhmm. Yeah. So we began to discover what we now coin as our beliefs on why relapse continues to happen. And like we say, every time we talk about our story, you know, Brandon tried all the things and everything kept leading back to relapse. Relapsing like he's talking about.
Caitlyn:He was relapsing back into the same patterns. Even if they looked a little bit different. He kept trying to get free, trying to break out of the pattern, and then relapsing back into it. And it wasn't until 2019 we're like, okay. Yeah.
Caitlyn:I'm done riding this roller coaster. Like, I'm not going on this loopy around over and over and over again. Like, I'm dizzy, nauseous, sick from spinning and spinning and spinning. I'm over it. I'm ready to get through to the other side.
Caitlyn:And so I began to just think, okay, what are the only things we haven't tried? Like, what is it that we haven't tried yet that could get us free from relapsing again? And the biggest thing that stuck out to me was that we weren't getting deep enough. We were not getting to the roots. We were staying surface level.
Caitlyn:And as I reflect back on our season, and now as I reflect back with the many couples that we hear from and work with, and even people in all of society and our communities, I'm realizing that so often we have these addictions, addictions, we have these patterns, these behaviors that we don't want, and we just stay up high. We stay really on the surface, up top, looking at what it is with our we might even have our magnifying glass, so we're looking at the top level, and we're not really going that deep with it. It's like, oh, he looks at porn. So how can we get rid of him looking at porn? Like, oh, he had an affair.
Caitlyn:How can we get it so he never has an affair again? And it's like, oh, we spent five years trying that where we just stay on the surface. Okay, how can we keep him from doing these surface level things? And we'll just stick a surface level band aid on it. Oh, we'll read a book about not having an affair.
Caitlyn:We'll read a book about this. We'll read a book about lust. We'll read a book about prayer. We'll read whatever. We'll listen to whatever podcast.
Caitlyn:Go to whatever person. It's like, okay, here's this band aid. I'm putting it on the surface level because I'm just staying on the surface of what's going on here. And so I realized, woah, we need to dig way deeper. We need to dig deep below.
Caitlyn:It's like if, you know, the ground it's a ground level. We need to dig deep below the ground, deep below the surface. We need to get to the roots. A lot of what we teach in our workshops is let's do root system work here. Like if you've planted a tree and it's been growing for years, for us it'd been five years, our little marriage tree been growing, we have roots that are digging down very deep.
Caitlyn:We need to look at these roots because they're rotten. And we're just trying to look at the tree, we're trying to prune the tree, and we have rotten roots underneath the soil. It's like we need to figure out how to take a look at these rotten roots, see what's actually going on there, and see what needs to be removed, what needs tended to, what needs life breathed back into it. And so as we begin to hit these roadblocks, we begin to look deeper beneath the surface. What does that look like?
Caitlyn:It looks like everything we always talk about in all of our places. It looks like exploring your childhood. Most of the time, people don't realize that the answers to their what they perceive as their problems are actually found in their past stories and experiences.
Brandon:So good.
Caitlyn:So as we reflect backwards, we find the answers to our current day issues, problems, or patterns that we're trying to break free from. We're trying to get a surface level band aid to put on these issues and it's like, oh, if we just reflect on our past, on our stories, on our upbringings with compassion and curiosity, we would begin to see, oh, that's where it began. Yeah. This pattern that I have today didn't start today. It maybe started a decade ago.
Caitlyn:It maybe started years ago. Maybe started when I was a little boy, a little girl. You begin as you look beneath the surface to understand where everything started and the trajectory, the journey that it took to get you right to where you are. And if you aren't, if you just go, oh yeah, something from my past is impacting me right now, that's not gonna give you the answers. That's the curiosity piece.
Caitlyn:That's the compassion piece. You actually have to have curiosity like a detective to go sleuthing around in your own story, to go finding details, finding clues, finding facts, finding whatever is hidden, these hidden little gemstones in these caves of your life that help complete your story, that help complete the full picture. Most of us don't see the full picture very clearly because we're just trying to look right here, right now, and the days moving forward. It's like, yes, be right here and now in the present and look back at your story picture to figure out why you do the things you do, why you keep doing the things you do. Like, there is so many of these stories.
Caitlyn:I remember one couple, they ended up getting divorced, but the husband was coming to random. This was actually just right in the midst of our recovery.
Brandon:Mhmm.
Caitlyn:And he was like, I don't understand why I keep feeling pulled and tempted and keep ending up going to massage parlors to get, you know, favors. He's like, I just don't understand it. Like, I just have these urges. I can't control them. I don't wanna do this anymore.
Caitlyn:We're on the brink of divorce. And Brandon's like, let's go back to your story. Let's look at your story. Let's look at your life. Because he he has no idea.
Caitlyn:He has absolutely no idea why he keeps doing this. And come to find out when he was a little boy, his older neighbor, his mother's friend was an older woman, his neighbor close by was also a masseuse. He went over to go see her for a massage. His mother had set this up, and she ended up giving him sexual favors that he did not ask for, which then started this entire shame cycle because he didn't want it yet it felt good. So he kept going on this entire circle.
Caitlyn:Decades later, he's married with kids still acting out in the same way, just a slightly different twist and he has no idea why. And the answer was right there in his story that entire time. Yeah. And sometimes, all it takes is seeing clearly for you to unlock and have an moment and awareness where you can come back into your body, into your situation, into your story, and realize, oh, there's the answer for me. There's the unlock.
Caitlyn:There's my healing, and there's my path forward.
Brandon:Speaking of situations of abuse like this, for a lot of people dealing with sexual addiction or any addiction, it's wreaking havoc in your marriage. There's often a mental block when it comes to being honest about situations you've had with family member, friend. Any anytime there was abuse where you feel guilty, like this friend's situation, he never actually created boundaries with his mom. He never actually pressed charges against the person. He never actually made the wrong things right as far as not pretending that never happened.
Brandon:He pretended like, oh, that's it wasn't a big deal, and then that still continued to impact his behaviors and his actions on a daily basis. And so what I wanna empower you with what we wanna empower you with right now is if if you've had a traumatic experience as a child, stop ignoring it. It's not honoring to your parents, to the to your grandparent to ignore the abuse you went through. That gives you no freedom. It gives them no freedom.
Brandon:It creates a death cycle in your relationship. So if you're, if you're acting out an addiction, trying to keep somebody else safe because of something wrong that was done to you. Yeah. It's confusing as heck, but I would, you know, you might be already going to therapy for that, but I would get crystal clear on what actually happened to you and in labeling it and defining it, not just ignoring it. That will not get you to the other side.
Brandon:You will continue to relapse because you will there's a part of you that's trying to integrate, that's trying to make sense of this experience you had that you're ignoring. What I wanna talk about what Caitlyn and I were were just alluding to, if you don't go to the the depth of of why addiction was there to begin to begin with, it's like saying you can be healthy. Just don't eat junk. It's it. Just stop eating junk food.
Brandon:Stop going to porn. Okay. If I stop eating junk food, why automatically be healthy? Not necessarily. There's actually quite a bit that goes into living a healthy life.
Brandon:So if I just say stop going to porn, does that mean you're gonna have a healthy sexual experience with your wife? No. You would actually wanna understand, okay, what were the implications of porn? What did porn do to my perception of sexuality? What did it do to my ability to get aroused in the present moment with my wife without the fantasy of some obscure sex scene from a screen I saw?
Brandon:Am I reliving some form of childhood trauma? Is there a current day unmet need in my soul because I'm in a job that I hate? And am I not taking care of myself? Am I not getting any sunlight? Am I staring at screens all day?
Brandon:These are the things you can't just stop eating junk food and have a vibrant life. You have to fill it and you have to make sense of everything that the junk, how it impacted you. So we can't just say, stop eating junk food, stop looking at porn, smack your wrist when you think about it and move on. You're going to come back to it. That's why a relapse happens.
Brandon:Another piece with this is when you get caught in addiction, you obviously don't feel good about it. You don't feel your best. And so you try to minimize in your mind. We talk about this with denial. You try to generalize, you try to reframe the addiction as not that big, because if it is, it can feel like it could consume you and almost like wipe you out.
Brandon:Like you don't want to admit that the addiction was a big deal. So in your mind, often make it much smaller. And I want to, I want to propose this. Although we think that changing a little would be easier than trying to change a lot. For example, if I said, Hey, I want you to make a few minor improvements to your life.
Brandon:Are you open to that? Some people say yes, but then I ask somebody, Hey, are you willing to change your entire existence? Are you willing to absolutely start over? Most people won't say yes to that, but the ones that do will look radically different because they actually put the mentality of, Oh my gosh, I got to go to the base of I am. I gotta take a look at everything if I'm gonna change a whole bunch about who I am.
Brandon:So when you're approaching addiction and approaching not wanting to relapse anymore and wanting to experience freedom, connection, rebuild trust in your relationship, you're not trying to change a little bit. That's why we talk about your spirituality. That's why we talk about how much sunlight you get. That's why we talk about your childhood is this is not something where you make a few small tweaks and hope it works out. If you have been bound by addiction and your marriage has been the beneficiary of that result, it's time to change everything.
Brandon:It's time to uproot every experience you've ever had, every belief you've ever had and say, is this serving me, or is this keeping me bound? Is this taking me back to addiction? So I would say you're doing yourself a disservice trying to change a little bit. When you try to tell yourself it wasn't that big of a deal, like, I I had I had an addiction. Yeah.
Brandon:I did this. Make it a big deal. Not from shame. Like, oh, you are so messed up. But like, if you were that close to dying, treat it as a near death experience.
Brandon:How would you wanna live after a near death experience? And you're getting a second chance to be like, oh my gosh. I was holding my breath. I was almost dead. How do I wanna reinvent my life?
Brandon:That's the approach. That's the wake up call to never relapse again is you don't try to change just a few degrees from what you were. You go into such a different direction. You begin to take hold of life in a way that you've never thought possible. That's how you don't relapse.
Brandon:We'll talk about the specifics right now.
Caitlyn:That's really good. I think the other areas when we're looking at okay. When we look below the surface, okay, you mentioned look at a childhood, look into these patterns, look into when you were first exposed to whatever it is that you are currently now addicted to. For our story, that was sexualizing people, images, things online. It was anything in the category of sexual brokenness.
Caitlyn:That was Brandon's addiction. He actually had a screen addiction. Those really go hand in hand at this point in our current culture. Yes, you can find sexualized images in magazines. For the most part now, screen addictions and sexual brokenness go hand in hand.
Caitlyn:And I actually find that sexual brokenness, that whole category of addiction, normally goes hand in hand with video games as well. It's this need to constantly be consuming and getting dopamine hits from winning things and seeing nude people. So it's like, oh, how can I keep conquering people, conquering the world, filling this void inside of me like what Brandon's talking about? And so whatever it is your addiction might be, trace it back in your childhood to when you had your first experience with that. If it's alcohol, if it's cigarettes, if it's food, if it's work, if it's whatever it is, where did that start?
Caitlyn:It's like crazy to me. It's like, oh, how are we not looking at this? How are we not looking at when this started and when our first why are we focusing so much on the right now? Like, oh, I got caught looking at porn right now. It's like, how about when you were looking at porn ten years ago and nobody was catching you?
Caitlyn:Your parents didn't know. Your friends didn't care. Like, nobody at school cared. Like, it only made you cooler. Why are we not taking a look at that?
Caitlyn:Because that's where all of the answers are. Because you can find out the true story of what you were avoiding in those moments. Yeah. Oh, when I was a child and I was exposed or I pursued or I found whatever the language is, I found this thing that I'm now addicted to. What was I trying to experience?
Caitlyn:What was I running from? Maybe, like the story we shared, maybe that boy was actually trying to experience anything. He found himself in a situation that he didn't know he was showing up for and he had an experience, and then he was trying to recreate that experience. So what experiences have we had that we're now trying to recreate? As you ask yourself these questions, as you look with honesty, as you look with compassion and curiosity, you will begin to see a lot clearer.
Caitlyn:The other category that we recommend, we talk about this heavily in our workshops, is looking into your spirituality. We already did a couple episodes on this topic, so we're not gonna dive deep into it. But what spiritual beliefs did you grow up in? Because like we talked about in our two episodes where we talk about our Christian upbringing and how we tried saving our marriage with Christian disciplines, and we talk about spiritual bypassing, if we have these paradigms, if we have these ways of thinking that are keeping us bound and we're choosing them, we need to look below the surface at Mhmm. What are these belief systems?
Caitlyn:What are we believing? Even if you're not a Christian, if you're of some other world faith, or even if you say you have no faith, you still believe in something. Even if it's nothing, you believe in the belief of nothing. And so whatever it is that you're believing in, whatever you believe that is true, there are things that need to be looked at within that. Yeah.
Caitlyn:You need to look below the surface of when did I first hear in my church, whatever religion it was, about sexuality? What did I hear about sex? If your addiction is sexuality, what did I hear around that? When we begin to look into this topic, we begin to realize, oh, this didn't enable Brandon and empowered him. He realized that growing up as a boy, he actually was told he'll always struggle with his sexuality.
Caitlyn:We even went to a Christian counselor, we talked about this in the first season, from our church, we were adults at this time, and he said some men will struggle with pornography and lust for their entire life and they actually he was saying, they actually cannot get free. This is how they will live their entire life. That's just how they are going to be. So Brandon began to look at, what did I hear as a young boy growing up from my own father? What did I hear from the men around me?
Caitlyn:What did I hear in my church community and my small groups? What did I hear at school? What did I hear when I went to church camp? What did I hear as I got older and older and older and I had mentors, people I reached out to when I was feeling temptation? Like, we begin to boil down and look at all of these conversations, and we begin to realize, oh my gosh, of course you keep relapsing.
Caitlyn:Of course you keep doing this over and over again because it's almost as if this collective curse has been placed on you Yeah. To believe that you have to live this way. And all we needed to do was lift that curse. And that leads into the third category, which is assessing all the paradigms that you have about yourself, your marriage, the patterns and behaviors that you have, the addiction that you feel like you cannot get free from, what are the thoughts that you have around it? Do you actually think that you can get free?
Caitlyn:Do you actually think that there is a way to walk in wholeness? Do you actually feel that your marriage could have deep connection and intimacy? You have to be able to look underneath at all of that history. It's like doing a deep dive on all of your web pages that you have open, all of the histories of everything.
Brandon:Yeah.
Caitlyn:Going into your brain and looking at all the memories and seeing what's there, seeing what is your foundation at the moment and finding what feels true and right and good for you and what feels like it has been keeping you bound. What do you need to cut ties with? Because if you can't look at those things, if you can't see those things clearly, you'll just keep spinning in the same circle, which is what when I think of relapse, I think of spinning in the same circle, trying to get out. It's like you're in this room, and it's like there's absolutely no doors, and you're just spinning in circles and circles and circles and you cannot get out. That's what relapse is, is this never ending ride that you can't get off of.
Brandon:If you have a contradicting belief like Caitlyn's talking about, well, there's a spiritual one and societal one. If you can't reconcile a contradicting belief, then you can't, you can't heal from it. Can't surpass it. You can't overcome it. So if, if you have the belief, the, the root level belief that men and women will always be sexually broken, then how do you actually ever heal thoroughly and completely from addiction?
Brandon:The answer is you can't. So we encourage the depth of looking at the current beliefs you have, which you're like, well, how do I identify which ones they have? They will come up on your path. They come up through identifying what level of freedom do you want. So right now, what does, what does sexual freedom mean to you?
Brandon:It means, well, you could start with, I don't look at porn. What else? I experienced a vibrant sexual connection with my wife. Great. I don't sexualize other women.
Brandon:I'm free to engage my environment online and in person without looking at women's body parts, having sexual fantasies, being bombarded by the past. You see how you can get you can get more detailed. What do you really want? What do you really want from your sexuality? But then what will happen is you will then moments later hear, but that's not possible.
Brandon:Or I was told that that's saved for when I die or that the devil always tempts us and leaves people astray. So you you have to write it out so you can see where the contradicting belief is. And then you have to ask yourself, do you wanna hold on to that belief? And this is how simple it is. Our beliefs are actually not rooted in effort.
Brandon:Right now, we're sitting on stools. I'm not believing that this stool is holding me up. Now I haven't really had a chair ever break on me, but I'm not forcing myself to believe this chair will hold me up. This chair will hold me up. You can simply let go of the belief.
Brandon:You can let go of it. I could stand up and sit down in another chair. View the shifting of your beliefs as simple as standing up from the chair you're in and the results you're getting from it. If it's causing you severe back pain, it's time to sit in a different chair, or maybe it's time to go for a walk. So when you look at your beliefs, don't judge yourself as you let some go and you adopt new ones that will empower you.
Brandon:Within all of this, why addiction also why you relapse into addiction is you're living a poor life. When you're living a life that you hate, you hate the job you're at, you hate where you live, You hate your friends. You hate the president. You hate the economy. You gotta escape from it.
Brandon:You have to escape from a reality you've told yourself is horrible. Now there's gonna be two parts to this. Building to building a life that you love is not just wishful thinking. It's actually assessing, am I at a job that's in alignment with our core values as a family? And and we'll end the podcast in a in a few minutes talking about what creating the more looks like.
Brandon:But for now, you just need to recognize, is your addiction rooted in trying to escape a miserable life? Because if it is, just getting rid of the addiction, if you don't fulfill it with things that are fulfilling, that are in alignment with your family values, with your marriage values, then you will come back again.
Caitlyn:Mhmm. Yeah. And I think an important piece that we want to move into now is what does it look like for us to live free of relapsing? So we wanna really Brandon's gonna really set the stage here of you know, he talked about what it looked like for those first five years, what it looked like keep relapsing, to keep looping, to keep going. And now we're gonna move into what does it look like for the last five years of our marriage as we've just celebrated ten years together.
Caitlyn:What does it look like for the last five years of our marriage when there has not been a single day of relapse? And I want to note that it has not been I think a lot of people go, oh, wow. You must be trying so hard. You must be efforting your way through this. Like, this must feel exhausting and burdensome to carry on this big old bag of all of these pressures and burdens.
Caitlyn:And so we wanna dive into what does it look like to live free from relapsing? And we wanna talk about the light load Yeah. The pressure free powerful stance that that you've embodied in the last five years of your transformation.
Brandon:Yeah. Well, I wanna honor you, sweetie, for setting the stage for me to be able to step into this new reality because it was one you were already walking in and the standard you were already living by. And I actually fought this way of living, I'll describe, because I thought it was impossible, and I thought Caitlyn was controlling and over overbearing because she thought it was possible for me. And then when I had no more nobody else to blame, couldn't blame Caitlyn anymore and realized Caitlyn's out of the out of the picture. I still don't like how I'm living.
Brandon:So I got to the point where when we're looking at my sexual history, we're looking at the the way I still looked at women, still thought about women, still navigated everything. I got to this point. I was like, I don't care if, like, I do care about my wife, but I don't care if she's in the picture. I actually want her reality more than this one that I'm living in. And so what we did is we, we went into this, my sexual history.
Brandon:We, we, I took inventory. I began to take acknowledge when I was objectifying a woman in person. And I, we talked about this, the six month process of like resisting this and like not wanting to think about my sexual experiences in in with other women, movies I'd seen, with porn I'd seen. And I began to say, you know what? Let's take a look at it.
Brandon:Let's actually evaluate what was here. And for a season, I I felt like my sexuality got worse. Like, I was like, oh my gosh. I'm becoming so aware of how broken I really am. But what happened in the, in that process of what we call taking inventory is we begin to see patterns.
Brandon:We begin to see the types of women I was objectifying and not like to fuel the addiction, but just to be curious, to be aware of like, how did I get here?
Caitlyn:It tells a story.
Brandon:Yeah. It began to tell a very clear story and it begins to highlight to me, wait a second. I thought I was a victim to my biology. I thought this was something I could not control. And as we identified patterns, it became very clear.
Brandon:I do this behavior when I'm feeling anxious. I really ramp up objectifying other women when I'm feeling lonely, when I'm feeling overwhelmed in public. It all began to tell a story that was not a mystery. When you begin to look at your story with curiosity, you begin to realize, wait a second. These are the breadcrumbs that make it crystal clear of how I got here and what need I'm trying to fulfill my soul, and I'm doing it the wrong way.
Brandon:I'm doing it the incomplete way, a way that's not sustainable, that's not giving life to me or or my marriage. And so I began to use the four r's, which we'll talk about in just a second, which was a way of rewiring each thought, each memory, each glance of objectifying a woman in the present day. And over the course of thirty days, which I had spent about six months of kicking and screaming, of fighting my way to it, over the course of thirty days, all these thoughts, I started rewiring all these experiences and I felt empowered to rewrite the sexual narrative in my body, in my emotions. And it lost its charge. It lost the pressure.
Brandon:It lost the pull to look at another woman's body. Over that time, I thought it was impossible to never automatically look at a woman's butt, look at a woman's chest. And over that time in those thirty days, I was like, wait a second. I got my choice back. I got my choice back.
Brandon:And it wasn't this, I have to try really hard. It was actually the stopping and acknowledging this is how I was currently looking at women. These are the memories I was having. They blocked me from even emotionally opening up to Caitlyn. There's so much debris there and I begin to assess them.
Brandon:And then from that point forward, there has been no returning back to the previous way of engaging my world sexually. So I haven't objectified women, haven't gone to inappropriate websites. If an advertisement or something's come up, we've communicated about those things, but I've never sought out the body of another woman to alleviate my anxiety, to look at with sexual curiosity, to look at body parts. I look at women's faces. I look at women the way I look at men.
Brandon:And that feeling was a feeling of liberation that I could not fabricate and was not something I told like, hey. I'm free now. It was like, I told Caitlyn for months, you're crazy. You're crazy. You're crazy until I was at rock bottom.
Brandon:Like, I'm just tired of talking about this. Maybe I'll actually try it for myself. And then I tried it, and I was like, you're not crazy. What you've been saying all along is what freedom feels like and tastes like. And I'm like, I spent so many years running from this when this is how we were designed.
Brandon:So that's why we talk about the root of attraction. And we ask you to go deeper is because why not go to the root level? We have two words that we wrote down is it's about the roots and the rewiring. If you can identify the roots behind the behaviors, identify exactly what took place, what happened to you, and then you can make sense of those situations and rewire who you want to become in a systematic, consistent way, then relapse isn't a part of your, isn't a part of your life. Freedom is because you're consciously choosing.
Caitlyn:So many people live a burdened life and wanna label it as free so that they can hopefully fabricate this experience where they, oh, if I call this burden that I'm carrying freedom, then maybe I'll begin to feel free. And then they look at, oh, look at this couple talking about this free way that they live where Brandon's saying, oh, I don't objectify or feel like this strong urge to lust. And some men even go like, oh, so do you walk around with your eyes looking at the ground? It's like, oh, no. That's not freedom either.
Caitlyn:It's not this shameful, I'm such a negative, dirty person, I have to look down at the ground. It's like, they wanna look at the freedom that we're walking in and say, oh, that's a burden. That freedom that you're walking in, that's so burdensome. Like, how dare you put so much pressure on yourself? And it's like, oh my gosh, we've got so backwards.
Caitlyn:It's burdensome to walk around with a belief system that you have to notice everybody's body parts and find certain people attractive and see that they're attractive or feel attracted to them or act on the attraction to them or get online and go to the explore page and wonder, oh, poor me. I keep seeing, like, half naked women on my phone and my wife's gonna be upset with me. Right. It's like, that's a burdensome life.
Brandon:Yeah. That's a burden. That
Caitlyn:heavy. Yeah. That feels dark. That feels disconnecting. That's robbing you of your joy, of your love.
Caitlyn:The very purpose of being alive. It's robbing you of all your vibrancy. Stepping into this, where you realize, oh, I can live fully satisfied and intimate with the one who I've chosen
Brandon:Yeah.
Caitlyn:To unite my soul with, my spouse, is so free. It is so light. And sometimes all you need is to know from someone who's experienced it and made it to the other side that is completely possible and it's completely worth it. Brandon is not daily fighting the devil on his shoulder hoping.
Brandon:Forgot which I forgot. I relapsed. I forgot which shoulder he was supposed to sit on.
Caitlyn:He's not scared of relapse. That's the thing, is once we tapped into this, it took thirty days. Once Brandon tapped into this, and experienced it for himself, this transformation, it was over. The battle of temptation, of lust, of sexual brokenness was completely over. It is not even a part of our daily existence.
Caitlyn:I as a wife, which I know that countless women who've reached out to me long to experience, I as a wife have absolutely no fear going outside with my husband. I used to remember even before I knew all the depths of his story and what he was choosing to do online and in person, I used to remember feeling so uncomfortable if we would go somewhere and there's people laying out in swimsuits. Because I used to wonder, does he notice them? Does he see them? Does he think they're attractive?
Caitlyn:Does he think they're hot? I would compare my body to theirs. What if he likes their body better? What if this? What if that?
Caitlyn:That was burdensome for me. That was a dark and heavy load to carry for me. Yeah. The load is light now. There is no load.
Caitlyn:What I get to walk in as a wife is so much safe. Safety. Yeah. So much trust. No absolutely no awareness or no thoughts about, is my husband looking at her?
Caitlyn:Does my husband I'm not even aware of it. Because I'm not worried. I'm not myself analyzing, oh, there are other attractive women here? Are there other women that my husband would find more attractive to me? Do I need to go into insecurity?
Caitlyn:Do I need to go into doubt? Do I need to go into distrust? No. Yeah. Because I have so much established trust and safety in our union.
Caitlyn:That is what diving deep offers you, is true freedom. Yeah. And freedom is light. So if you think you're living in freedom, and you hate your life, and your marriage is disconnect, like freedom looks like something. There's fruit on your freedom tree.
Caitlyn:And if you don't have fruit on your freedom tree, then you don't have freedom. It has to look like something. If you are crying and disconnected and not in love, can't even go on dates, can't have conversations, don't know what to talk about, keep relapsing, keep going through the same things, then you don't have freedom. Yeah. You might wanna say that you have freedom because you're scared to take a look at things, but you don't.
Caitlyn:Because when you have freedom, you have fruit on your tree.
Brandon:Yeah. The last thing we wanted to identify was if you're ready to start rewiring your thoughts, which we talk about this a lot inside of our grounded intimacy program, working through addiction and broken trust is the tool of the four r's. So I'm gonna go through those and give you just a highlight of what that can look like is when you're rewiring your thoughts. The first R is to recognize that the thought is there. I'm going to give you all four hours and I'll break them down.
Brandon:So the first one is to recognize. The second one is to receive. Then the third R is to release. And the fourth R is to replace. I got these from a pastor mentor, a friend of mine and adapted them to my circumstance back in 2020.
Brandon:So the first thing, when you have a situation, a thought or a memory, the way you're looking at somebody that doesn't feel life giving, it doesn't producing intimacy in your relationship or freedom in you, you wanna recognize it. That's where you stop. You take a deep breath. You say, I recognize that this memory is impacting me right now, or this the way I'm looking at somebody is not how I would choose to to look at them. So you just recognize it.
Brandon:You just put a pause, take the subconscious thought, bring it into your conscious mind. Say, this is happening. I recognize it. The second thing is to receive peace in your body, peace and power to just say, okay, I take a deep breath because your brain can change, but not if you're clenching. That's what we talked about.
Brandon:It's not this isn't like gritting your teeth. Oh, I shouldn't have looked there that way. It's like, no, I recognize I looked there that way. I receive peace in my body to create a new pattern. So you take that deep breath and you say, I receive peace and power.
Brandon:The third R so we have recognize, receive the fourth third R is to release. So you take that memory. You take that way of looking at somebody or that impulse and you say, you know what? I released this. I let this go.
Brandon:It's as simple as if you were standing next to a flowing river and as though you had something you wanted to let go, you let you set it into the river and you watch it flow away. It's no longer your burden to live under that old thought pattern. And the fourth one is to replace it. So you recognize it's there. You receive peace in your body.
Brandon:You release the power of it, and then you replace it with how you would like to have shown up or you rewrite the old memory. When I was a kid and I went to porn, I replaced that memory with going and hanging with a friend and playing catch. I replaced that with having safe people around me. You you replace it with what you actually need and what you how you actually would like to respond. In the present day, I actually am no longer gonna look at women's butts because there's not there's no but there for me.
Brandon:There's nothing there for me. And I'm gonna replace that with looking at her face and feeling free in the next experience. So you reckon you recognize, you receive, you release, and you replace. We go through that in-depth in our grounded intimacy course because we think that the thorough approach to healing is how the how relapse never happens again.
Caitlyn:Yeah. And what we wanna leave you with is really the heart and core of our message, of our personal story, of our experience, and the reason why relapse has never happened for us, which is that we got everything out. You'll hear us say this everywhere at all times and all places. We got to the roots and we shared it out loud together. And there's probably not a single other soul at this point of this recording that shares this message yet and I do believe that there will be many others who share this message in the days to come.
Caitlyn:We got everything out and we shared it out loud together. Nobody recommended that to us. Everyone recommended against it. Why do I think that? Because nobody was brave enough to try it.
Caitlyn:And Brandon, when he hit rock bottom, was like, this is it. This is the last the last thing I can think of that we could try is we're gonna get this all out. Yeah. We're gonna share it out loud. There's nothing we're gonna keep from each other.
Caitlyn:People are like, I get this message all the time. Okay. When you say that, like, what things should we share with each other? Everything. There's nothing that shouldn't be shared.
Caitlyn:There's nothing that should be kept from each other. Everything that comes to your mind as we're even talking, every memory that comes to your mind, every belief system, every thought, every time you look at somebody and you notice their body parts, every single time you scroll past something online, every single time you choose to do something that goes against your family's values, your family's standards, the conversations you've had in your union, the things you said you're not gonna do, everything, all of it, everything you've lied and hid and stored away, experiences you even had before you knew each other. Yeah. Experiences you had in the beginning of your relationship, the beginning of your marriage, and experiences you're having current day. People hide and lie and stuff so many secrets, and they plan to take them to the grave and they don't understand why their marriage is crumbling.
Caitlyn:Yeah. And I realized five years in, day in and day out of so much relapse, that the reason why our marriage was falling apart is because we had so much. We were hiding and lying from each other. I'll say it every single day. You cannot have intimacy into me you see.
Caitlyn:If you are lying and hiding things, and if you don't have intimacy in your marriage, then what do you have? What is marriage without intimacy? What is union without intimacy? That is the whole point of choosing into union, of choosing into coming together and becoming one, is that we are fully in love, fully intimate, fully connected. These are my favorite words.
Caitlyn:This is what you experience on the other side. If you wanna live a life where you never relapse again, and I wanna say this too because I forgot to mention this in a previous episode, when Brandon was going in this six month pattern of breaking down his denial structure, he never relapsed back into old patterns because as soon as you realize and believe and choose to decide, like Brandon said, to switch from one chair to the next, you don't ever have to go back to those old patterns. If you're listening to this and you've struggled with pornography for your entire life, you don't ever have to look at pornography again. It's as simple as believing that truth, that you are completely free from that right now. And guess what?
Caitlyn:I guarantee, if you struggle with pornography right now, I guarantee it to you, that if right now, you journal out everything you've been keeping from your spouse, every single little thing, everything, if you journal that out and you go and you talk through all of that, you will never look at pornography. You will never desire to look at pornography. You will never desire to look at another woman except for your wife. You will be fully and madly in love with your spouse, fully satisfied, fully connected. You will wake up and become alive.
Caitlyn:You cannot go on with life carrying a bag of secrets anymore. It's the one thing nobody told us, and it's the one thing I will scream from every rooftop that healed and absolutely transformed our marriage. Is that there's nothing I don't know about Brandon, and there's nothing that he doesn't know about me. And that is the safest place we could ever be. So many people are hiding behind their secrets because they think that's making them safe.
Caitlyn:And it's actually the very thing that's destroying your safety. Yeah. Destroying your union. Knowing everything about Brandon, regardless of how devastating, regardless of how painful it was in those moments. We talk about this in the betrayal episode, regardless of how devastating that was.
Caitlyn:What we have on the other side was so worth it because now we see each other, we know each other, and we love each other, and there's no greater gift in your union than that.
Brandon:The gift of all of this we talk about all this stuff, is very heavy. It can feel like a lot. You're like, okay. Well, what if we work through the addiction? Like, then what?
Brandon:And as Caitlyn's saying, you're not just enjoying in this beautiful connection together. You're also creating a beautiful life. So when you remove a life that you're trying to escape from, you're no longer running from your childhood. You're no longer running from your past, but you're integrating it. You and your spouse can create the life of your dreams.
Brandon:It doesn't matter if you're 85 years old and you're like, is it too late for us? Absolutely not. You can still be the the grandparents that loved their grandkids and kids well. You can still have the adventures you wanna go on. This is actually the start of your relationship.
Brandon:We aren't telling you this so that you can just live boring lives where you have no fun and you just cry all day. The whole point of addressing where the pain is is so that you can actually live and enjoy each other day in and day out. Caitlyn and I live a beautiful life of adventure connection and fun. I told God a couple years ago, I'm like, look, if I stop playing video games, I want my life to look like one, which was is not quite I didn't have the language for it. Basically, if I'm gonna stop fantasizing about a life I don't have, I wanna live a beautiful And without going into details of, like, what that means for us, it's allowed us to visit so many places, experience so much together, and it may look completely different to you.
Brandon:But what it means is you get to wake up every day full of gratitude, full of connection, and full of a burden free life where it's like, wait, I'm full. We are full. And so we want to thank you for joining us. These are our thoughts on why we think relapse to addiction happens and how you can eradicate it for good. If you would like to work with us through our grounded intimacy program or join my men's community app, you can click in the show notes, take a look at both of those offerings.
Brandon:And if you could do us a favor and leave us a review on the podcast that helps us reach more couples, or if you wanna send it directly to a couple you know is is struggling, that would mean the world to us. We will see you guys next week. Thank you so much for joining us.