Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - So here's the million dollar question. How are men like us who work hard, have good motives and a God given purpose supposed to fulfill the calling on our lives and the dreams in our hearts, all while establishing sexual integrity, thriving relationships, and a meaningful connection with God. That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Sathiya Sam. Welcome to Unleash the Man Within. Yo, yo, yo. What's up, my man? It's Sathiya Sam. Here I am, your host of this wonderful podcast, Unleash the Man Within. I'm so glad you're here. We're really the only daily porn edition recovery podcast that I know of. But look, there's lots of great resources out there. We're just honored to be in the fold and to be very quickly approaching half a million downloads. We've only been around for two years and we started with nothing. You know, I had no platform. I had no audience. I had nobody interested in what I had to say two years ago.
Speaker 1 (00:01:00) - I guess it's a little bit more than two years ago now, and I'm just amazed at our growth. So thank you guys so much for your support. You are the reason that we do this and you're the reason we'll continue to do this. Now, if you want this listener experience to stay as great as it is, which let's not kid ourselves. I mean, you guys don't get any sponsorship promos here. There's no advertisements. We literally do absolutely nothing to earn a penny from your listenership. And if you want things to stay that way, I ask in return that you share this content with somebody that you know. Bonus. If you can share it with somebody who's got some influence, who leads a group or leads a church or something like that. But honestly, just sharing this with your friends and your peers and your colleagues helps a ton. That's how we get the word out. That is literally why we're about to cross half a million downloads. It has nothing to do with with me or promoting this or whatever.
Speaker 1 (00:01:51) - We don't do anything to promote this on any of our platforms, really. And I got 80,000 followers on Instagram. I could be talking about this every single day if I wanted to. I choose not to. I let you guys do the talking for me so that way the right content actually gets elevated in the algorithm. That's just the honest truth is you guys decide what you like and then share it. And so if you hear something valuable here, all I ask in return, just, just just to keep this listener experience as clean as possible, is that you would then send this to somebody, share this with somebody, or share it on your platforms if you got one. All of that means the world to us, but really it helps us change more people's lives and grow what we're doing here and what God's up to. So look, today we're going to be talking about deconstructing arousal. This is part of a two part series. Tomorrow I'm going to talk about deconstructing lust. And these these ideas sort of came out of some conversations I've been having lately with the with the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:02:46) - Actually. I've just had the chance to interview some pretty phenomenal people. And my friend Shane O'Neill and I got into a really good conversation about about genres and porn genres and all that kind of stuff. And that interview is going to come out in a few weeks. But there was there was a particular topic that that came out of that interview that I thought would be really good to talk about in advance. And so you guys get a little bit of a of a preview. Those of you who listen to this podcast like every day, who actually listen to every podcast, you're going to get a little bit of a preview that should actually set you up very well to glean even more from that interview when it does come out. And I'll take a look here while we're talking. I think that interview comes out. I believe it's in November. Yeah, it's November 23rd is when it's scheduled right now. So so anyway, that's kind of what we're going to get into today. Now, let me let me set the stage here.
Speaker 1 (00:03:41) - Arousal is a really interesting subject, right? Because arousal is unique to everybody. Now, there are some basic fundamentals of arousal that we know exist for everyone. So what do I mean? Well, novelty in general adds to our arousal. So this is why we tend to escalate the kind of content we watch and even the kind of acts that we seek because novelty adds to the degree of arousal that we experience. And so when you experience something new, even if it's a little bit weird or obscure or extreme, the novelty of it adds to arousal. The second thing that's very common with arousal that's important for people to understand is touch. And so it's interesting that a lot of sexual abuse stories you hear about somebody who is abused by another man and the the you know, because they experienced arousal during the abuse. A lot of people draw conclusions or at least experience some confusion about like, wait, if I if that was a man and that man caused arousal in me, then am I gay? Right.
Speaker 1 (00:04:47) - It kind of it naturally lends itself that way when, again, like that's kind of another conversation for another day. The reality is touching of our genitals actually causes arousal, period. Those are just concepts that exist. Now what I'm talking about today is more of the individualized components of arousal. We're kind of pitting trauma versus preference against one another because it's very interesting when you start to get into the conversations around what arouses people and what are the specifics of what somebody's drawn to and what they're not drawn to. There's well, number one, it's incredibly individualized. It's not principled or generalized in any way, shape or form. But. Secondly, it's hard sometimes to actually tease apart or deconstruct what is like what is trauma that's contributing to this and what's actually more like just my God made preference. And this is something I've had to work through because I'm kind of I'm in a very stereotypical category of porn addict that in the sense that I had some issues in my relationship with my mom growing up. And those issues led to my pursuit of pornography and chasing girls and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (00:06:01) - And that was reflected in the content I watched, which was a lot of kind of incestuous stuff, right? It's like stepmom or mom stuff or whatever. And that that the content I was watching was actually very reflective of my trauma. Not so much my preference. You know, I didn't marry somebody that fit that that category or that type. The woman I married is very different from the kind of content that I used to watch in a lot of ways. In some ways, maybe there's some overlap there. But the point is, and that actually the fact that there is some overlap there shows just how complex this is. There is the trauma and the part of us that is wounded that is driving some of this behavior. And then there's just some preferential elements that are that are good, that are healthy, and there's nothing wrong with them. So the question is, how do we know what is healthy and how do we know what is stemming from trauma? Well, the easiest way to find out is to get healed of your trauma and to see what sticks around.
Speaker 1 (00:06:59) - That's the easiest way to do it. I know that sounds like grossly oversimplified, but if you if you actually do like some Emdr therapy, you see a trauma. Again, don't don't go to a general therapist and work through traumatic things. Go to a specialist who's focused on trauma and who certified and can do Emdr and brain spotting and some of these other techniques that that's a much better play. And if you if you take that avenue and you work with a specialist and you work through your trauma, you as a person start to become a lot more integrated, a lot more better rounded and a lot more whole. And as a result, your arousal palette might change your arousal template, as we call it, that might begin to change a little bit. It might begin to morph and modify. And that's actually a really beautiful thing. And that's how you kind of start to know, Oh, those things were actually more they were more related to my trauma than they were just preference. And it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (00:07:55) - It kind of saddens me how many conclusions we draw about our own sexuality without first going through a healing process, like not realizing that our experience of sexuality has been so broken and that we need to actually get healed and repaired first before we could actually really draw conclusions about the link between sexuality and our identity. And, you know, in today's day and age, those that kind of approach is unheard of. It's incredibly foreign, but that is actually the way we want to approach this. So if if you're unsure of like, you know, trauma or preference, how do I know for sure? I honestly think that's the best way. I've heard some people say, you know, you can well, how does it how does it impact you? Like, do you feel good about it after? Do you feel ashamed? The problem is that that's just it's very complicated to take that kind of approach because I felt ashamed about some of my preferences just because sex was such a shameful subject growing up. And so if I just measured of like, Oh, well, I feel shame about everything.
Speaker 1 (00:08:55) - So I guess all of this stuff is related to trauma, right? Like we have to be careful in. We don't. We want to. Yeah, we don't. We don't want to categorize things inappropriately. So that's, that's my honest I'm sorry that like there's not an easier solution. But honestly guys and I'm becoming more and more convinced of this as time goes on, as we see more, more clients come through. But honestly, even as I see more friends and family's lives enter some very complicated and messy situations, it has driven home the point to me more now than ever before that we need to deal with our trauma. And if you're unsure if some of your some of what you're experiencing sexually is especially arousal, like if you're unsure if this is more trauma driven or if this is actually natural and okay for you, then I would really encourage you to work through your trauma first. Now, the second thing that I could add in as a little bonus here is you're going to have to do some some inner child work as well.
Speaker 1 (00:09:53) - And this is kind of related to trauma, but it's kind of different. Inner child really focuses on some of the or at least has an element of the belief systems and the things that you that were either passed to you directly or indirectly growing up. Those things can also contribute and they can blur the lines between something that's traumatic and something that's preferential and that can be really helpful as well. So again, I would say get some trauma therapy really, really valuable, some inner child work. You know, our coaches really focus on the inner child stuff, the trauma therapy. You would we could I could actually give you a referral if you ever want to write us in. I don't know that she's comfortable. Me sharing it publicly, so I'll leave it there. But just because I know she's already booked out a couple of weeks in advance. But but yeah, we can we can help you out with that. But look, Emdr has like, blown up, so there's lots of Emdr specialists. I'm sure you could find one in your local area or just somebody online if you wanted that as well.
Speaker 1 (00:10:45) - So lots of options out there for you guys, but hopefully this is at least a little bit of a crash course in how to broach the subject and maybe how to piece apart like, is this my trauma or is this my preference that again, no, no, no. Episode here is fully comprehensive, but we try to give you little tasters, little samplers, and hopefully this did exactly that. So thank you guys so much for listening. And again, if you're finding value in this podcast, please make sure that you're sharing this with people that you know, people that you love and people that you think ultimately could benefit from what we're doing here that helps us grow. And it also helps us signal to other people that, Hey, this is valuable content, come check out what we're doing here, and they can be part of the movement that is unleashed. The man within and deep clean coaching. So much love to you guys. Thank you so much for listening. Stay clean. We'll talk soon.
Speaker 1 (00:11:30) - Bye bye. Hey, everybody, it's Sathiya again. Thanks for listening to Unleash the Man Within. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about a free e-book that I wrote for you called The Ultimate Guide to Porn Recovery. It provides a basic framework for the recovery process and a few of my top tips completely free of charge. You can get it now at w w w dot ultimate recovery guide.com. That's WWW ultimate recovery guide. Com. Now if you've been impacted by the podcast and you want to show some support in less than 60s, there are three ways you can do that. First, you can leave a rating or review on your podcast platform. This lets people like you know that the content here is valuable. Secondly, you can share this episode with someone in your life that might benefit from the content. If you're passionate about helping other people experience freedom and success in their lives, this is one of the easiest ways to do that. And lastly, you can subscribe. I personally only listen to the podcast that I subscribe to.
Speaker 1 (00:12:32) - If you're seeking daily encouragement, guidance and insight in your recovery journey, I highly recommend subscribing to Unleash the Man Within. Thanks for listening. I look forward to connecting with you very, very soon.
Speaker 2 (00:12:45) - The information, opinions and recommendations presented in this podcast by Sathiya, Sam and his guests are for general information only and should not be considered medical, clinical or any other form of professional advice. Any reliance on the information provided is done at your own risk.
