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#544 Freedom from Porn: Steve Pokorny's Journey To Freedom · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:10
  Speaker 1: I'm very excited to be with a good friend of mine.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: We haven't known each other for that long, but we hit it off really well.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: He's a theology of the body guy.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: He's Steve McCorney.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Steve was exposed to pornography at a young age, struggled with pornography compulsion for many years and then he encountered freedom.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: He was inspired to found Freedom Coaching in 2011.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: I really thought there was no hope at all, he said, but by the grace of God I've been set free from the domination of lust.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: We're going to be talking about that a little bit more today.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Steve holds an MA in Theology and Specialization in catechetics from the Franciscan University of Steubenville and MTS from the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family Studies.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: That's a great program.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Steve's a certified life coach life coach training from the Life Coach Training Institute.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Author of Redeemed Vision another beautiful program setting the blind free from the pornified culture.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: It's a 12-part video series redeeming our vision.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: On Formed.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: He's an internationally known speaker.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: It's so good to have you, steve.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: How are you?
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: I'm so great, Jack.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: It's such an honor to be with you and to share a little bit of the darkness, but also some hope here.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we know it's a battle.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: John Paul said and you know this well, steve, going back many, many years it all starts in the battlefield of the heart between love and lust.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: He said it so well.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Right, the opposite of love is not hate, at least not initially.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: The opposite of love is lust, it's using somebody.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: What we're seeing, steve, at the John Paul II Renewal Center, we're working with all spectrum of ages, but we're really seeing our pornography addictions.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Let me just start this way when I ask young guys today, what did you do first?
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Did you hold the young girl's hand first or did you see hardcore porn first?
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: Nobody ever says they held the young girl's hand first, and this is the underlying issue of all of these gender ideologies that we present on what's happening in the libraries, your kids' local, right in their schools, with all these ideologies.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: But right underneath them is pornography.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: It's always pornography, and these young guys are getting really addicted to it.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: It's stealing their innocence, and so let's talk a little bit about that.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: You know this program.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: You got caught up in a young age too, so tell us a little bit about how you got started.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Where you're at, I'm just going to throw it in your court and see if we can't help some of these young people and give them some hope, like you said, steve.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: Amen, amen.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: Thank you, jack.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: So much for that.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean my history very briefly, jack.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: So much for that.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean my history very briefly.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: My history goes back to when I was five and I grew up in a household, jack, when a father, mother, a brother.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: I didn't have a dog.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: I have two dogs now.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: We're good to go now, but all that would shift when I was five and my father came from a background from Vietnam and that really influenced him.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: But he also grew up in the affluency of the 80s and wanted to get rich quick.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: My mom said he wanted a better house in the stock market.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: My mom said no.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: My dad said I'm going to do it anyway.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: So he forged her signature.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: He thought the deal was lost and he thought the best way to take care of our family was to kill himself.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: He went into the garage, he closed the garage door, turned on the engine and half an hour later my father's short-term memory had been destroyed because of carbon monoxide poisoning.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: So my father was in a nursing home from the time I was five and I grew up without a father.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: And if we look at the world we live in, right, I think there's, there's a desire in, especially in young boys, they and it's it's always been there to want to be a man.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: What does this mean?
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: And when that is not there, then we're given a lot of other other messages.
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: So for me it's fending, fending off here.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: My father would pass away, actually, when I was 17 to cancer, and in between that time I was exposed to pornography.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: And this is right before the pornographic revolution of the internet, shall we say, and I want to make this very clear to those who are hearing this.
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: The internet is not evil.
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: Right now, jack, you and I were meeting and we're using this tool for great good, right, and so technology itself is a good.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: It's a matter of how we use it.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: That's how the church, the church's message on technology is.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: But it's been.
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: But we can also say that we know that technology, the advances in, especially modern technology, modern means of communication, has been influenced and pushed by the pornographic culture, the pornified, those who are creating these types of technologies.
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: So we do want to be aware of that.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: So for me, nobody was talking to me about this.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: There was no healthy, honest, open conversations about sexuality.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: My mom's a single mom trying to deal with this, and then these images are presented, first in a brown paper bag at about seven houses down on the street.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: Then, a year later, a friend of mine from school, whose parents had videotapes in their bedroom.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: What is in your home, my dear brothers and sisters, the fathers and mothers who are hearing this?
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: Your kids will pick up on it one way, explicitly or implicitly, so we must be aware of that.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: And then, soon after that, was the internet.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: This, I was hooked on this right, and I, I think the other thing to let you know.
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: For all those who are hearing this, the best term that we can use is not addiction but compulsion, because addiction has the idea that once hooked, always hooked.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: This is who I am, this is my the rest of my life, and we want to say it's's serious, it's a problem, it's an attachment, but it can be healed, and so that's what we call a compulsion, that's the best way we like to use it in the work that we do, and so for me, this compulsion would grow and grow through high school, into college, in seminary and out of seminary.
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: And this was just a present until I was led to Franciscan University, where I heard for the first time in my life that these very important words from Isaiah 43, 19,.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: Do not perceive it.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: Something new is happening here.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: These streams of living water will begin to flow, an image of the Holy Spirit flowing in through here.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: And this is what God wants to do with each and every one of us, whether we have an attachment to pornography or any other attachment, anything else.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: He wants to be Lord of everything in our life and he wants to take all the brokenness and to redeem it.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: And for me, well, this began here back in at Franciscan, and what especially happened was about two weeks after two, three weeks after that happened, I was receiving the Eucharist, the body, blood, soul, divinity of love liquefied, poured out for you and me, and moved to gratitude for what Jesus had done for me.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: But it wasn't just Jesus.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: I realized, it was the Father.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: It was the one that I thought had abandoned me, had left me, had forsaken me, right Because he had died, shall we say, twice in my life.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: But here the Father is showing up and he says those very important words you, stephen, are my well-beloved son.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: Right as a boy, we've been crying out with various behaviors, trying to find my place in this world, trying to find my identity, the father's confirming my God-given identity right, and in the midst of this happening, it happens, jack, boom, boom, boom, boom.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: These chains hit the floor and this desire to want to use my sisters through all the years of life, and what that had been doing to me.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: I should say what was so damaging about pornography?
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: It had closed my heart.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: I'd been trapped in the, we like to say, a force field of guilt, of shame, of self-hatred.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: Well, of all the good I was doing and I was a practicing Catholic I wasn't able to receive this until the Father would come in to remove this.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: And then what happens is there's a change of desire that began to come in there.
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: There was a healing that happened there and that would stay, jack, for about four months.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: Okay, where there was no.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: I had open internet, no desire whatsoever to go searching online for things that just will never satisfy.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: Well, I fell back into the septic tank and it was god.
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: It was wanting to get to the root of it, so serious.
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: Through a series of events, one was doing something called called theophastic prayer, which leads where the, the emotions lead, lead to the fire.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: There was healing there.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: Second, led to something called intensive trauma therapy, which for the first time in my life actually talked to somebody about what I was going through all my programming with pornography, and there was a breaking through that happened during that week.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: And then the third element is especially was communicated through John Paul II's theology of the body, the beauty of the human body.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: Nature abhors a vacuum, right, and if all we're giving, if all we're presenting to our young people is this broken image of the body and we're not presenting the truth about the human body, especially helping young people to see the body as we're created to do it, then we're going to go for the counterfeit because we're looking to be satisfied.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: The desire to be satisfied is not a bad thing, because God put it there.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: The question is how are we going about to get that satisfaction right?
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: So I come here today to share a great message of hope, especially to those who find themselves trapped in this.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: For parents, fathers and mothers you find maybe your son, maybe even your daughter because it's an increasing number of people involved in this are women.
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: Maybe you're finding they stumbled into this, or they find themselves having an attachment and you're not sure what to do, how to handle this.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: Well, there's hope here and there's healing.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Well, we get a lot of emails from 14, 15, and 16-year-olds, which is kind of a tough age, steve, because as adults, we can't just go out and grab a coffee with a 14 and 15 and 16-year-old, right, just because of the age itself, and so those become the harder ones, I think, to reach.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: You know, I can, I can a guy that's 20, 21 years old, I can sit down, I can introduce them to other people, we can do things.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: So many of these young people, though, are in that, that age where, if the parents aren't on this and if somebody doesn't understand what these kids are going through, they can struggle with this for a long time.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: What do we do about that age group, Steve?
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: That's a tough one.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: It is tough and literally this is very real for me.
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: I have a friend of a family who we're having a discussion with.
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: He's 17 and doesn't know what to do with it.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: The good news in that family, it's an open conversation.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: So the first thing here, jack, is to acknowledge that there's an issue, acknowledge that there's no problem, that they'll just get over it or this is just the way of the world.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: Well, we're not called to float downstream Dead bodies float downstream.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: We are called, in many cases, to go against the culture.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: They're hunting your children, right, and I just think of my own children.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: I have daughters who are 11 and 14 right now and they ask me like, hey, daddy, can we watch this movie?
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: I'm like, all right, let me do some investigation, let me check into this and I'll go to places like IMDB or Common Sense Media and I'll look up to see what's actually in these movies.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: I'm like, no, and we're getting flack here.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: But remember, and we're getting flack here, but remember, parents, you are not called to be your son's or daughter's friends.
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: That's not your calling, right?
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: Your calling is to raise not good children, not good adults, but to raise saints.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: Right, and it's very tough here, right.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: So, first and foremost, if we're talking about this, jack, acknowledge the problem, acknowledge that this is a real deal, right?
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: If your sons and daughters are there, they're in this Second second, do not freak out, do not.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: We do not.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: The shaming game does not work.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: What we want to do, the here's your big word curious, get curious, have a sit down with them and and an open conversation, open place of this, of what did you see?
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: Where did you see this?
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: When you saw this, what, what emotions came up for you?
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: Right, the thing that locked in, that will lock them, that will create the spiral, the downward spiral of this, is that they don't have an open, honest place in which to share what's going on inside here.
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: Right, which means, for preventative measure, or even if we have not been doing this right, father Patrick Payton said that the family that prays together stays together.
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: We can also say the family that eats together stays together.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: So, five days a week of, at least, I would say, of doing family meals together, family dinner together, right, obviously, the family rosary is going to be important, but what we're trying to do in those meals is we're trying to create an environment where it's open, where we're talking about things so that when these emotions get eroticized or when they are exposed because the sad reality is it's not if, but it's when we can actually start beginning to talk about these things right, and we want to create an environment, not that we accept this behavior, no, we make that very clear and make it clear why it is, but not from reaction, but proactivity.
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: And we want to make it clear I want to know what happened here and when we've established an environment that it's safe to come to talk to mom and dad about these things, the likelihood of them opening up and not going to their friends or going online to do a search on this stuff, to find out what is pornography, for instance is going to be much, much, much more likely.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, while Steve's saying this, I'll just give a little plug for the John Paul II Renewal Center.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: While Steve is talking about those things, and I know there's parents that are going to say, oh my gosh, I don't know what to do.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: I had a porn addiction or I've never talked to my kid about any of this stuff, and now he's 14 and I should have gave him the talk but I never did.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: We have a.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: We have a.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: I hate to call it a program because it's.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: It's an encounter.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: We call it love at encounter, love education, encounter.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: It's with parents and kids doing exactly what you said.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: We do it when they're when they're 10 years old, and again when they're 12 years old, with the parents, dad with his boy, mom with the girl and we're creating that bond.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: So I'll just say that that there's.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: We can get a little ahead of the game, and that's the idea to fill up these young hearts.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: Steve, once you're, you know it's a powerful thing.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: Once you let the genie out of the bottle, and I'm talking about lust.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Once lust goes in, something happens to the human heart.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: It really changes.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: When I'm talking to young guys especially, I don't work with any young guys that did not have a problem with porn and they're good Catholic guys or good Christian guys.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: They've got out of it most of the time by the time they're coming to me, or they're trying to get out of this battle already, and they've been fighting it for years.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: But I walk with them, talk with them, walk with them, lead them into the sacraments, but they become the best speakers man for us.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: You know, with the John Paul II Renewal Center I'm not looking for porn addicts right but they come because they're looking for something.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: They're looking to fill their hearts to your point, steve and then it's a joy to work with them, because we're all broken man, we're all got something going on right, and Christ is amazing.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: You don't know the power that you described earlier until you put it on the line and you say I need to be healed.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: right, be it done to me, according to your word huh, and there's a power there isn't there, steve.
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: Oh gosh, yeah, no, no, no, I mean totally, and this is the thing we have to remember, right and in the work we do in Freedom Coaching, again founded freedom-coachingnet.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: what we want to see here is we work with Okay, let's back up a little bit.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: So I'm struggling right now.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: I'm 22 years old, I'm struggling.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: I'm listening to this.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: I'm struggling.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: I'm listening to this.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: I mean, what do I do now?
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: I'm talking about your organization.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: I'm talking about you know, I need help.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: I decide I need help.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: I got to turn to somebody.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: I go on and I watch Formed and I watch those episodes and now I say, yeah, I need this, I need somebody to walk with me.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about how your organization specifically does it help men and women.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: How do they initiate that?
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: How do I start?
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: What do I did?
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: I give you a call, you know.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: And then what happens to me?
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: Sure, sure.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: I've had guys say is it?
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: like AA.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: I mean, is it, you know?
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: And because you said earlier, uh, it's not an addiction, I think most of the guys that I know that are in in coming out of drug rehab or AA, a lot of them would call that addiction.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: And so are you saying that this is different than that type of an addiction and maybe it doesn't matter for right this minute?
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: And then what do I do with this?
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: Sure, you're hitting multiple questions, so let's go ahead.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: I know You're heavyweight, I don't think I had ADD when I was a kid, steve.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: I think I'm developing it now, so sorry about that.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: No, no, I appreciate this.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: So, first off, I would say is just be honest, be honest, if you realize there's an issue here, shoot us a message, freedom-coachingnet, just shoot an email there and then we can take it from there.
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: And if you go to, you know what is freedom coaching.
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: That'll give kind of a more of a layout of what we do, how we work.
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: So, to be very frank, right, the 12-step programs.
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: Right, there is a benefit for it.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: Right, there is accountability, there is a community.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: Those are really important, right.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: But one issue that we find and we're not 12 steps in the work we do with freedom coaching, One of the issues we find is the idea of once hooked, always hooked, that this is going to be who I am, this is my identity, and so, whereas you'll find, in some elements of the 12-step programs, they find themselves counting days.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: Let's say, somebody goes 90 days sober, I've been sober for 90 days, congratulations.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: Well, what about day 91?
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: Well, let's say somebody has a flip at day 91, right, does that mean everything they just did is not for value?
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: Right, I have to turn in my coin.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: Whatever that means, right?
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: Well, and what that is?
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: It reinforces the shame cycle, right, and the difference between guilt and shame.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: Guilt is I've done a bad thing.
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: Shame is I'm a bad person with no inherent worth, right, and I don't want to show you who I am.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: I'm afraid to reveal my mask to you, right?
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: So we don't even get into that process, jack.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: What we do, we teach the philosophy of hashtag day zero.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: What's today Day zero, jack.
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: What's tomorrow Day zero, my friend.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: And what's the next day?
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's all day zero, all day zero, and the reason is give us this day.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: Give us this day our daily, this day, this day, this day.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: Right, he's the god.
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: Yes, god was in the past and he will be in the future, but that's not our focus, that's not our, we don't have control of it.
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: It's today.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: He meets us here and now.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: Jesus god, the father, sent jesus christ to die for us.
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: Now, if we were the only ones who do it in a heartbeat.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: Right, and going back to an earlier point, we work with a ton of Catholics, right, 95% of our clients are Catholic, if not more.
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: Our team is blatantly Catholic.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: Okay, we do serve the non-Catholic population as well I'm going to make that very clear but we're blatantly Catholic and we don't pretend that we're not.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: And from this, though, a lot of these are good Catholics, or trinity good Catholics, yes, and men and an increasing number of women.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: Right, because we've created a culture.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: Basically, we don't know what a woman is.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: Matt Walsh does, apparently, or maybe not, but beyond that, right, if we see broken men into this stuff, if I'm going to get any of my feminine desires met, as a woman would say, then I have to be in pornography too, and it's destroying our capacity to live in the true identity of ourselves.
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: And when we don't know our real identity, we make very poor choices.
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: So, within this here, we don't want to count those days, primarily because we want to focus on our identity now, where we're at here.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: We're not, as John Paul said right at the closing ceremony, closing mass in World Youth Day in Toronto, right, we are not the sum total of our mistakes and failures.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: We are the sum total of our Father's love for us and the capacity to paraphrasing to live as the image of Jesus Christ.
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: Right, this is power.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: And so, as Catholics, it's not simply about doing things, of just going to Mass or praying the rosary or receiving the Eucharist or going to confession.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: Those are doing things.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: Don't stop doing those things, jack, let's make that very clear.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: But it's about entering to the why.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: Why are we doing those things?
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: Allowing Jesus Christ to be Lord of our lives and to transform our life so that we can live in the power of the Holy Spirit.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: This is what he wants to do for us.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: And the sad reality, jack, most Catholics have never heard this.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: What a shame.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: Let's pause on that for a second, because people need to take a deep breath, because what they need to understand is that they weren't given this and it's really terrible, right?
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: We come into a time of a sexual revolution, right?
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: Whole upending queering of society in today's terms, where we take everything that's normal and turn it upside down.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: And we weren't given this.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: We weren't given what you said, and I want people just to listen to this again.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: You know it's not something that we haven't talked about before on this show, but God gave you those passions and desires and if you allow them, if you allow them like a rocket, if you allow them to open up to what Steve's saying and be purified and untwisted and undistorted, it will actually get you to the stars, because this is a big deal, steve.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: And then I'm going to throw it back in your court, because young men say, hey, if you take away my passions and desires, who am I?
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: Am I still a man?
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: I was worried about that.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: I remember as a young guy, right, hearing these messages from the church and saying, all right, if I don't lust after a woman.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: I never had a problem with pornography, but my imagination was really good and I could see a woman coming down the aisle of Costco and say whoa, and then start to think about her.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: Right, I learned, if I could open those desires, I could say thank you, jesus, for that beauty of that woman and open her up right.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about that, because I think this is the most powerful thing.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: You know our eros are really.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: It could be a sensual thing but you know, the early ancient Greeks would say no, this is for the true, the good and the beautiful, especially the beauty of love right, especially the beauty of love.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: Oh, you're hitting on all of this.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: Right, our desires are not bad.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: It's a matter of what do we do with them.
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: That's the question, one of the prayers, and I encourage you as whoever's hearing this, you want a simple prayer to start with.
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: Start with this prayer God of desire, my desire is for you.
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: Jesus Christ is the God of desire.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: That's who he is, and these desires he's planted into us.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: But if we are never told what these desires are and, even more, what is the fulfillment of these desires?
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: Our world proposes a ton of counterfeits.
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: Right, and to see if I can get this quote right, there's a quote, reportedly, from St Augustine said the man who is lost in his passions is less lost than a man who has lost his passions.
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: Right, so we can say, yes, it's those who are involved in the issue of pornography or unchaste behavior.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: Right, it's not a good behavior, it's not something good, it's something that will not fulfill.
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: But in a certain sense, they're looking for something.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: But where?
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: A lot of Catholics.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: When we walk into a lot of Catholic churches, what do we find?
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: A, they're empty.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: B, the men especially are bored and we're leaving for either Islam or for an evangelical church.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: And C?
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: Why am I even here?
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: I think the Eucharistic revival was a great way to begin to capture some of that passion.
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: We need a lot more of that right.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: Well, you know what I'd say?
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: I'd say that I think that was the wrong way to start the Eucharistic Tell me more.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because I think we should start with what we're talking about now.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: What we should have started with was marriage, the family and the human heart, and then we should say what are those passions and desires leading you to?
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: And the next year, do a eucharistic revival, do a marriage, family, a human heart for young people, young people.
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: We're doing a human heart revival first and because you know, you know, when the smoke and fog clears our deepest yearning, burning desires to for, for love, to for a man to a woman, a woman to a man, points directly at the Eucharist and got Christ's desire to be one flesh with us, and when you say, whoa, you're kidding dude.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: So anyways, hey, I agree with you.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: The Eucharistic revival was good to have.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: We saw some good things come out of it.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: I just think you know we put the, you know we put the horse, we put the horse out there in the front and we forgot the human desire.
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: And and because the churches didn't fill up after that either, steve.
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: Well, if I can, if I can, let's go.
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: Let's go.
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: Comment on that, jack.
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: We're taking this conversation in very different places, but I think it's important.
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: I think the spirit is guiding this places, but I think it's important.
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: I think the spirit is guiding this right and I think there's a connection between the issue of pornography and the Eucharist right, because what is being presented in the Eucharist?
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: What's presented is the body, blood, soul, divinity of God incarnate.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: Okay, if we cannot and we've been they did a few research poll in 2019 that said about 8% of Catholics, self-proclaimed Catholics in the United States were going to mass on Sundays regularly.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: Okay, to less than one-third of those 8% believe that that's actually Jesus Christ physically present.
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: That means less than two Are those right?
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: So 8% of Catholics right now are going to mass on a regular basis.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: No, no, this is 2019.
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: This is 2019.
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: Okay, and that date is really significant because so we were talking about in 2019, about the estimate, and this was a Pew Research poll that was conducted by and commissioned by the Catholic Church in America, the USCCB, and they found here that it was we're talking about less than two-thirds 2.3% of Catholics in the United States actually believe in the real present.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: What did happen in 2020?
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: Our bishops shut down our churches wholesale in many cases.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: You have the still waiting on that apology, and then what you have here?
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: You have the, you have the word.
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: People are not returning to church.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: They obviously see this as a crisis.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: They're trying to do the Eucharistic revival Good, I'm glad they're doing it.
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: Then you do a lot more and but what we find is what?
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: What replaced that human contact was?
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: Everybody gets online, so many people, and this is where our young people right, we we force our kids out of school online.
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: They're doing things.
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: They stumble into pornography, and now this stuff is.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: This stuff is growing here.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: So now even greater number of people are involved online into, into internet pornography and the behaviors that stem from that, and what happens is it is.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: How are we supposed to see the body of Christ if we cannot see the bodies of others.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: Our programming are these pornified images.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: And remember, go back to Eden.
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: As you know, the human body is to be a living revelation of the mystery of God.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: The naked human body is to be a living revelation of the mystery of God.
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: The naked human body.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: But what we're being programmed with because they're being airbrushed, because you have AI coming in right now in a big way is we're being programmed.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: This is the message our young people are getting.
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: Say this especially to the fathers and mothers hearing this is they are being told that the ordinary nakedness which they're going to if they're blessed to get married is simply bad porn.
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: And this what we're talking about is the union between man and woman, united in marriage to be open to a third and to the next generation, right?
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: If that is, shall we say, a spiritual contraception gets in, which is what pornography is.
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: You have a pilling off of the ability for real desires, for real relationships.
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: Life can't come forth and literally, for those parents who are hoping for grandchildren with a healthy marriage that those grandchildren are going to be raised up in, this is all hands on deck and we have to talk about this and find some real answers for this.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're exactly right, we would put it as an anti-creation, right.
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: So we have God.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: The Father gives his love to the Son.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: The Son receives that.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: We have becoming from that is the Holy Spirit.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: And a man pours his love out to his wife, his wife receives that and what comes out occasionally is a person, a baby.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: You know, this is actually a tiny, created reflection of the Trinity.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: Pornography, contraception, abortion, you know, same-sex, meaningless marriages, say, is, from a procreation standpoint, right, it's all an anti-creation, right.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: There's no creation, there's no third, as you would say, and this is a direct attack on God himself.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: And what happens when you take God out of the human heart, you know, at first, pope Benedict would say at first, when you take God out of the human heart, nothing seemed to happen, everything goes along all right, and then it doesn't, and then it doesn't.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: And we go down these streams, don't we?
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: With alcohol, with drugs, with pornography, with all kinds of, with alcohol, with drugs, with pornography, with all kinds of different things, with gender ideologies.
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: We're really seeing that among young people.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: Steve, I have a pretty big talk coming up or a presentation at a retreat we're giving myself and a sister, a beautiful young sister.
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: Ananda.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: And we're going to be talking about these things, and so this is a really important conversation to have, because the George Barna study that just came out said 61% of all US adults are looking at pornography.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: And when you say 61% of adults, then probably I don't know, steve, what your guess would be, but it's going to be more males than females there.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: We might be up into the high 70s of young men.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's US adults in general.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: It's really something right, it's really something.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: What is this power that has the power to take a young man, a young woman's heart and twist it and distort it like that?
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: I mean it's amazing power of Eros, this power that God gave us to be people of love.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: So when you have that rocket ship that's launching, can you imagine when the devil twists and distorts that, how far down that rocket, when it gets inverted, can push down into a darkness?
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: And I think that's what I don't think there's any power here.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: John Paul talked about this.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: Steve, there's no power like sexuality to distort a young person's heart.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: There's nothing there, because we're made for love.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: And I would even add to that, Jack, great, great intro here.
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: I would add to that that the simplest way for our young people to lose the faith is to get into a pornified lifestyle, right, so get into these images and then what the haters that come from that.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the way you would to unpack.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: That is how, Steve, if you were just saying to a young person, this is going to twist and distort your heart, but this is going to move you away from God.
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: So well, whatever, how does it do it?
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: What is it doing to you when you say that?
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: I mean, look, I know these are complex issues and you unpacked a lot of it already, but is there anything else you would add?
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: If we're talking to young people in a kind of an elevator speech way and say, boom.
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: Sure, I'll give one tool, especially to parents.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: We mentioned the forum series.
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: That's called Redeeming Our Vision.
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: I do recommend that a secular, a secular resource that I would recommend.
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: They do a lot of good work.
• 32:01
  Speaker 2: It's called fight the new drug and they have a series called brain, art and world.
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: Okay, and and again, it's.
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: It's not an end, all be all.
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: I, I would say there's more to be done with the solution part, but the awareness of the issue.
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: And I would just highlight here, first and foremost, what is doing the brain and, in a nutshell, okay, we have various chemicals.
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: We have dopamine, norepinephrine, as we have oxytocin, there's serotonin in here, right, and what we find is it's the same chemicals when you have healthy marital intimacy and then you have pornography.
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: It's the same exact chemicals, jack, but a very different reaction that comes here, whereas where those chemicals are finding a fulfillment in a certain sense, in that healthy act, right, we're more connected, we're more open, we are emotionally available, shall we say.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: With pornography use, what we find is it's an isolating event and those turn into not one of joy and of faith and of laughter and hope.
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: That arises.
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: It's the guilt, it's the shame, it's the self-hatred.
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: I don't want to show you who I am here and when we have these chemicals are being mixed up, what we watch, we become.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: And just on one aspect of mirror neurons, okay, this is a scientific element of the, it's the things that we watch, we become.
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: So, if we're focused on what is beautiful, what is good, what is true, right, these things we begin to crave here, we begin to enter into them.
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: But if we're on the reverse, if they're not beautiful, if they're not true and they're not good, which requires an education, right, what are those things?
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: Because we've been lied to saying, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: There is preference, jack, but there is objective truth.
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: So what we want here, jack, right, we do want those things, but how can it be presented?
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: In a way, so it's important for our young people to know what are these chemicals, what are they doing to us and how can I get into a place that it will really fulfill me.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: Wow, wow, okay, we're going to start winding down here.
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: I can't believe how fast time goes.
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about exactly what you do then, steve.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: So again, I give you the call now and I'm talking to you, or a coach, or how does you know, and then, and then is there an assessment.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: That goes on and look, we'll unpack this in a future podcast, but I want to give people just a flavor of it now.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: Who knows, somebody might say no, I don't want to wait till the next podcast, jack and.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: Steve.
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: I want to.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: I need to call and get ahold of somebody.
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: So we would obviously receive the message through our website.
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: We'll obviously greet them.
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: Usually, you'll hear from me, so if you want to talk to me, I'd be happy to do that, and then, if they feel this is a right fit, we'll get an application.
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: If the person is under 18, we will get the parents or guardians permission by writing.
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: Okay, so that speaks a little bit.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: How young could they be?
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: Because I get emails all the time.
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: That's why I brought up that 15 and 16-year-old kid.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: Can you talk to them if you get the parents' permission?
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: I've personally worked with ages 8 to 83.
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: So this issue is the average age of exposure, now of pornophobes.
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: Well, I know that, but I didn't know that you could talk to somebody like that.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: But if we got the permission, you can do it.
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I want somebody like that, but if we got the permission, you can do it.
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we have other members of our team.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: There are 11 coaches and we'll continue to add more as we go along.
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, okay.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: So when I have that 14-year-old?
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: I just got an email from somebody young boy went to Catholic schools.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: Going now to the Chesterton schools he's got a porn compulsion and I didn't know if I should plug them into you or not.
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: I figured I better ask you 100%, oh wow.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: That's a gift, absolutely.
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: That's good to hear.
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: It is a gift.
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: And, again, the reason why we're able to do what we do okay is because we know this stuff personally and professionally.
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: Again, I was hooked for over 12 years.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: God couldn't find anybody worse, and now he's got me doing this right.
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: And then, along these lines, two, two, two other people work, personal clients of mine, others had an attachment to this, and then we have others who just have a deep, deep heart and wanting to serve in this population.
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: So it's God is really aligning the pieces here and we get to see miracles happen all the time.
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: Those again who are trapped in the hell of this compulsion, feeling there's no way out.
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: I will never be free.
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: This is my life moving forward in genuine freedom.
• 36:26
  Speaker 2: Jack, I'll share this one story with you and I love this right.
• 36:29
  Speaker 2: This July I got to go to a wedding in Dallas, in the Dallas area.
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: I'm in San Antonio and my whole family is there.
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: The groom was a client, a former client of mine.
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: One of the one of the groomsmen is is a former client of mine who has two two kids I'm leaving the bathroom and one of the guys, like Steve Chris, he's getting married this month, right, so it's kind of a freedom coaching wedding.
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: So he didn't know you were going to be there.
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: No, I like yeah, no, I had no idea.
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: I just didn't realize.
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: So the ripple effects of this are huge, right In what we're doing.
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: So what we can say is and this is why, my dear parents, please hear this and enter in this, and again, we always say, at the work we're doing, talk to Jesus, do what into this place to really get an answer for your kids, because this issue doesn't just go away, it must be dealt with head on.
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: But also know this the issue of pornography and unchaste behavior is not the main problem.
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: There's other things underneath this, because the deepest desire of your young son or daughter is to see, to know and love and even before that, to be seen, to be known, to be loved.
• 37:41
  Speaker 2: Any of the pornified culture will never do this here, and Jesus Christ wants to come in that and he uses infallible witnesses to freedom to be able to walk with them on this.
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: Wow, wow, okay.
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: So you're going to dig in and the other people that are with you.
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: They go through some type of a training and again, we don't have to get granular with this.
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: We only got a half a minute left, but we do about 50, 50 hours of training plus more.
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: Okay, beautiful, beautiful.
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: All right, hey, steve, god bless you.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: Thanks for a good start.
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: I look at just.
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: I'm just going to tell everybody I'm going to keep inviting Steve back and so we can go a little bit deeper on these issues, because I don't know if there's anything right now bothering the young people I talk to more than this, and then they're getting married and I'm talking to them after they're married and they've never healed from this and their marriages are coming apart.
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: I'm talking to people that cannot consummate their weddings because it's their wedding night, and now this young woman doesn't look like somebody that he dreamt of with porn, and it's the saddest thing you'll ever do, and there's hope for all of us.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: So we'll get your information in the show notes, steve.
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: Hey, god bless you.
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: Thanks everybody.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: Bye-bye, thank you.