#87 - The Secret Sauce to Sexual Integrity Success
Our emotions make us humans. We normally feel sad, happy, scared, angry, or frustrated every time we encounter joyful events, scary situations, or even difficult moments in our lives. We also handle our emotions differently. However, suppressing and hiding from our emotions for too long may cause a negative impact on our well-being. So, aside from understanding and learning to control our emotions, we should also acknowledge what we truly feel at the moment and allow ourselves to process them in a healthy way.
In this episode, Benjy reveals the secret sauce of sexual integrity based on his own experiences. He will also bring us an overview of what it looks like to be in your darkest moments. Benjy will share some ways to understand and overcome frustrating situations to move throughout your days with more clarity, focus, power, and integrity.
Emotions are extremely powerful but gaining emotional control will support you in becoming mentally prepared for bigger and more overwhelming challenges in life. By doing so, we can avoid those triggers, temptations, and temporary solutions to escape these emotions.
Listen to this episode to learn how to direct your sexual energy in a productive and creative way by paying attention to your thoughts and emotions throughout the day to reflect on them later on.
You might also want to check out High Noon Connect to start answering your ‘whys’ and start taking responsibility for what you can do right now.
How to direct your sexual energy productively and creatively
Having awareness of your state of mind
Self-reflection in the form of journaling
The process of self-reflection
Dealing with your emotions
Feeling confident and comfortable about yourself
Episode Transcript:
Andrew Love
Welcome back to Love, Life, and Legacy, the podcast dedicated to helping you navigate these hypersexualized times of ours and overcome the dark forces of evil in the realm of sexuality. So that you can create a beautiful, bright light of golden beauty and God in the area of sexuality for yourself and your legacy, your lineage, your loved ones, all that. Today's episode is Benjy is a rant-a-sode. He got hopped up on the juices of the Holy Spirit, and he wanted to talk a little bit about the secret sauce of sexual integrity. What it looks like in your dark moments when you're feeling frustrated and how to overcome that in the immediate moment of the now, so that you can understand yourself why you're feeling these feelings, how to unpack them and how to move throughout your days with a lot of clarity, focus, power, and integrity. So that you have the days that you're committed to having instead of taking sharp left-hand turns into the dark corners of the web. If you're into growth and enjoying your life and boring stuff like that, and stay tuned. If you're into self-destruction then you have to go find another podcast. We don't do that over here. Let's get into it. Welcome, Benjy Uyama.
Benjy Uyama
Hello brothers and sisters, this is Benjy. Yes, this is another quickie episode, solo-sode, for you guys. I really wanted to just throw on the mic here and record a really inspiring thing that's happening with my groups right now. I'm running a men's group, a single men's group, who have guys struggling with their sexual integrity and figuring out how to navigate these hyperly sexualized nature of everywhere they are from school to work to the Internet, and trying to figure out how to direct their sexual energy in a productive and creative way as opposed to just feeling the deflation of acting out and masturbating, watching porn and acting out sexually in those ways.
So these guys are trying to get control of their lives. I really want to make this episode about the power of self-awareness, self-reflection, and I know this is probably the cheesiest thing I could probably talk about. But there's a reason that this is probably, honestly, in my personal experience and working with many men that I've worked within this area is that this is probably the most important thing to get right on the journey to sexual integrity. And it's the secret sauce, I'm telling you guys. If you can manage to have awareness of your state of being at all times, your state of mind throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the month, your self-awareness of your emotional state, and being able to pinpoint the times of the day or the moments where you're experiencing negative emotions and being able to reflect on why is it that you're feeling those emotions. This is the secret sauce.
This is when the rubber hits the road when you are really struggling your brains out and you're just feeling all kinds of negative emotions in your life like stress, anger, frustration, disappointment, arguments with a spouse or with a parent or a loved one, or just fighting with someone or you just don't like someone at work, or all these are huge triggers for people. Because what is the easiest thing to do to fall back on when you're experiencing those negative emotions is to fall back to your good friend pornography or masturbation, or whatever your habit may be to let you escape that emotion for a temporary few minutes and escape it and immediately go into a world that just runs away from and slams the door on those feelings.
It's extremely common for people, men and women, who are struggling with their sexual integrity to when they're experiencing any number of emotions, and they just want to escape it, they often go to their phone, and they often go to pornography or whatever habit they have. But when you can really, in those moments, recognize like: Okay, I'm feeling angry right now and just say it out loud, or tell someone. I specifically want to talk about self-reflection in the form of journaling or writing something down or typing something into your phone or whatever it may be, or talking to someone. Journaling is by far one of the most important things to do. And I want to give you a personal experience I had last week actually, just to kind of paint a picture of how this can be powerful for you.
I'll be sharing this with my group just today. The other day, I was taking a walk and I decided that I wanted to do some self-reflection because I was feeling like a superficial thought I had was like: Oh, I really want to go on vacation. I really want to go somewhere, that's why I was thinking. I thought for a second and I was like, why do I want to go on vacation? Why do I want to escape America and go somewhere like the Philippines, or see the sandy beaches with the clear waters? Why do I want to feel that way? It's not wrong, of course, to go on vacation. It's not wrong, but I was trying to figure out why is it that I want to do that and why is it I cannot just be happy to just be home with my family, with my kids, my wife, and just enjoy being together?
And I thought, why is that? And then I realized that after I dug deeper and peel back the layers of the "why", I realized little by little that I want to go somewhere because I want to escape. And I thought, why do I want to escape? I want to escape because I don't like being still. I was like, okay, well why do I not like being still? I thought, well it's because I don't like being in a situation that I'm not comfortable in. And I was like, why is that? And then I realized that I wanted to be alone, that's what I wanted to do. I want to be alone. I thought, why don't I want to be with my kids and my family? I was really getting honest with myself, why do I want to be alone? I realized little by little that I don't like being with people. I know that might be a little surprising to people, but I just don't like being around people so much. I thought why do I not like being around people? And I really started to go deep into myself and figured out that I don't like being around people because I don't like being myself around people. Why don't I like being myself? Because I don't want people to see my true self.
Why don't I want people to see my true self? Because I don't really like who I am underneath. Not who I am externally or whatever, I don't really like certain aspects of my personality or character, and I don't want people to see that. I don't want people to see me for who I am, and therefore I tried to escape that by being alone and not being with people. This realization was really powerful for me because I realized that there's a huge limitation I'm putting myself in in my life if I don't enjoy being with people. If I can just learn how to enjoy the process of getting to know someone, of looking someone in the eye and having a conversation without a need to put on a facade or to present something, to perform for them and to put myself in the best light possible and just enjoy being with somebody, whoever it may be.
If I can do that, the sky's the limit. Opportunities are endless. The amount of opportunities I have in life are endless for me if I can just be comfortable being myself in all situations. That's my new North Star Goal. I want to be someone who can be comfortable and be myself everywhere I go, and not feel exhausted every time I am in a social setting. I just want to be able to enjoy that.
The reason I'm sharing this story of peeling back the layers of my life in the process of going to this is, when you're self-reflecting, you might just think: Oh, it's enough to just say that I'm feeling angry, or I'm feeling frustrated. How much is that actually helping you get to the bottom of it and feel better? Not only to feel better but to avoid those situations. Not avoid being angry or frustrated, those are fine. But to avoid a situation of experiencing those negative emotions and then trying to escape them through, through what? Through acting in unfavorable ways. Through behaviors such as pornography, video games, overeating or whatever it may be. A list goes on and on in terms of the things that are unhealthy for us that we do to escape. And when people don't have access to those escapes, we experience some kind of withdrawal.
If you've ever experienced this, if you withdraw from pornography if you've been addicted for a long time for a week or two weeks, you start getting agitated very quickly. It's a very common withdrawal symptom from any addiction, is agitation. Why do you feel agitated? Because you had this crutch, this support system, this support crutch that I call it of pornography that you leaned on every time you were experiencing pain, frustration, hurt, anger, all these emotions. And when you remove that crutch, you try to look for another crutch. This is why people typically overindulge in unhealthy video game behaviors or eating or whatever it may be drugs and alcohol.
When you remove that crutch, you look for another question. We don't have that other crutch, you get agitated because you don't know how to deal with those emotions. This is what we're getting to. You don't have to deal with those emotions. And this has been incredibly helpful for the guys in my group right now. They're doing very well because we've had a tremendous emphasis on self-reflection, self-awareness of every day talking with someone, or journaling. Talking with someone that you know you can trust and respect and love, or journaling to yourself or talking with God, and really getting deep into it. An example of a practical way to do this is if you're feeling a negative emotion, not just to label and say, I'm feeling angry. Why am I feeling angry? I'm feeling angry because I got into an argument with my wife, and she said something I didn't like, or with my boss or my mom, and she said something I didn't like. Why did you feel offended by that? All because I feel like she shouldn't do etc, etc.
You can go on and on. Peel back the layers and get to why you're feeling like this. And when you can do that, your life stops. The reason for your emotion, your state of being becomes not about you, but it comes about something bigger. It becomes something about what I can do. You start to get excited about what you can do, how you can change and transform so that you can be a better person at the end of the day. And that's really exciting. I could blame my situation regarding this desire to go on vacation. I could just blame the virus, I've been stuck in America for over a year. Usually, we go to Japan every single year in the summer, and we didn't do it in 2020 because of the stupid virus, I couldn't do that. Or I could peel back the layers and try to figure out why I'm trying to escape? What am I trying to run away from, and realize that I just don't like who I am, and I want to change that. I want to be able to look in the mirror internally, not the physical mirror, but I want to look at the man mirror and love who I am, and have compassion for who I am, and be confident in who I am. Because I can pretend to be confident all I want. I can do a podcast, I can throw on the camera and record a video, I can talk to people I can present to people on stage. But at the end of the day, if I don't like who I am and my spouse and my children don't like who I am behind closed doors, then that's a problem. That's something I'm excited to change.
So now my North Star Goal is I want to be someone that is comfortable, and not exhausted in every situation regardless of who's around me and who I'm talking to. Whether it's to the neighbor, whether it's to people through work, whether it's through meeting somebody new or someone calling me on the phone, I don't want to get anxiety every time some random person calls me on the phone and like, I don't know who this is. Whenever I have to call someone, I want to just be confident and comfortable and just be myself. The more I do that, I know other people would feel comfortable around me if they can be themselves. So that's the kind of energy I want to give now.
I wanted to record this podcast just to wrap up because this is the secret sauce from what I've experienced in my life but also with the groups. It's not the only secret sauce, there's a ton of secret sauce, but the ability to, as we call it, tell the truth to yourself and to other people, especially in your groups. If you're in a High Noon group, or if you're not, join a new group. It's an excellent way, a perfect way to be able, to tell the truth about who you are, about what you're experiencing, and then peel back the layers and stop blaming and start taking responsibility for what you can do right now. And that is what we're all about. Thanks for listening to this quick episode. We love you. God bless. Take care.
Andrew Love
Hey, before you go, I wanted you to consider checking out High Noon Connect. So if you go to our website, highnoon.org, you'll notice, first of all, we have a brand new website which is beautiful. And also you'll notice that there's the opportunity to join High Noon Connect. The essence of what High Noon is morphing into is a community. We are better together, and sexual integrity involves other people. If you're struggling with pornography, you need the help of brothers and sisters, of people in a community dedicated to helping lift you up, and even if you're not. If you're in a relationship and you just want more intimacy, more love, more joy, or if you're single and you just want to be a person that can live according to their values in the area of sexuality, and you want to be around a group of people who are fighting in the same way then please go to highnoon.org and sign up for High Noon Connect. There's a free version and a paid version. We want to make this as accessible as possible. And we're nonprofit, so we're not trying to make a buck here. We're just trying to create a community off of Facebook that gives a focused conversation, focused energy, focused attention on building sexual integrity as a cultural intention. So go to highnoon.org, and we'll see you there.