9. Trauma and Porn: Correlation Is Not Causation

Welcome to the Breaking Free from Porn podcast. My name is Samir Gardner Gardner, and today we're going to talk about trauma and porn usage, the connection between both. So this is a topic that is extremely, extremely important if you feel like you've went through trauma in the past. Now let me just First, start off by saying that I do think, I do think that anyone, okay, and listen, I'm about to sound like I'm passive-aggressive, but this is not my goal. My goal is just to challenge your perspective, challenge the mainstream narrative around trauma. I do think that anyone can look back at their childhoods, at their past, and claim that they have trauma. Anyone can take one event or a multitude of events and interpret them as traumatic events. It is not to say that people are just trying to like overall, uh, play the victim card and therefore get a reward. Sure, this— that might be a part of that, but What I'm trying to say is I can say, okay, I went through bullying, which is the case for me. I went through bullying, therefore I have trauma because a guy punched me multiple times. Another guy might say, my parents weren't supportive, they would put me down, therefore I have trauma. And look, I'm not saying, okay, and this is key, I'm not saying that people, that the concept of trauma is false or that it doesn't exist or that working on getting rid of your traumas wouldn't be beneficial. I'm not saying that. I do believe that, okay, this is the thing I'm saying, that most people, the majority of people, or maybe everyone has some form of trauma. And if that's the case, what is the difference between individuals that reach some level of success in their lives, that reach— and by success, it's not just like in terms of academic or in terms of their careers and so on, but over a wide plethora of Areas. It can be relationship, okay? Like, um, they're— let's say they're age 40. Are they married? Do they have like kids? Uh, do they have like a good career? Do they have overall good relationships with other people? We can say— we can take people hypothetically that went through the same exact trauma and managed to have completely different outcomes in their lives. And we can clearly see that trauma does not have a cause and effect relationship with negative outcomes. To put trauma as the root cause of everything is like saying, I am not healthy because I eat sometimes junk food and just focusing on junk food whilst there are other things that are going on. Is it maybe you're not even going out of your house, you're just like sitting in your room all day long, therefore you're not healthy because of that. Is it that maybe you catch a sickness and you have like a virus and that's why you're not healthy. Is it that maybe you're having like a lot of stress and that's impacting your health. We can't just like focus on one factor. And we'll go back to the victim mindset mentality because the thing is, and this is something that's hard to swallow, it's a hard, it's a pill that's hard to swallow, that yes, the victim mentality, so to say, is something that we actually reward nowadays. and I don't even need to really give examples. I mean, you can just look at the legal system. If someone has certain type of justifications, they have a certain excuse that they can use to justify why they did something horrible. I'm talking about sometimes killing, killings, stealing. We then say, oh yeah, I feel pity, I feel bad for this guy, let's not really give them that punishment. I'm not saying that this is morally wrong or morally good. I'm just saying that it is something which we actually get rewarded for. To use our trauma and say, this is why I've been able to do certain things in my life, gives you a certain benefit, certain rewards. Therefore, to constantly remind yourself that you have trauma, to constantly maybe say it to other people, to express that, can give you— I'm not saying that this is necessarily what you're doing, but it's very important to consider that this might be the case— that it gives you a certain sense of comfort, a certain sense of reward. And by comfort, I mean The reward of comfort is, okay, I don't need to do these specific things, maybe. And that, that can even be something like, uh, legal or moral because of this specific event. Imagine I say, okay, I don't have to go— and we see this in school— I don't have to write, uh, papers in school, like the boring papers that people don't like, because I have dyslexia or because I have problems with my writing. I'm not saying again that like someone that has dyslexia or someone that has problems with their writings and like with words and letters that they have like not a valid excuse. Of course they might have a valid excuse. That's not what I'm trying to say. But if the person doesn't really have any problems with their words and letters and then they kind of like have this self-fulfilling prophecy where they say, actually, no, I do have a problem and they try to find evidence and then they act according to those evidence, and then they get the benefit of not writing papers hypothetically, then you see how this, you can say, victim mentality is actually rewarding them. Now, it's not to say that people that proclaim, that people that claim that they have trauma, that they are bad people, they just wanna have like rewards, they just wanna overall play the victim, victim mentality, it is not the case. What I'm trying to instead convey is that there is a possibility that these same exact events can be interpreted differently so that an individual can feel empowered rather than powerless. Post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. Did you know that there is the opposite of that? There is something else for the same exact event where people get PTSD. For example, war, for example, a natural catastrophe. I can take, as I talked about in previous videos, Indonesia in 2004 in Aceh. You see, the tsunami killed hundreds of thousands of people. Yes, they got PTSD, But as the years went on and they interpreted that event as this is just what God will— this is a test for us, this is an opportunity for us to go and really become stronger in terms of like their environments, in terms of connections with other people. Guess what happened? I do not have the studies pulled up in front of me, but I did talk about it in one of my videos on YouTube. You can find it. What happened is the PTSD actually went away for the majority of people that did get PTSD, and they actually saw PTG, post-traumatic growth. Post-traumatic growth. It's really important to understand this because this can really change a lot. Okay. This can really change a lot. Now, of course, if you have a good childhood, or this is again, like an issue, it's really relative. I mean, if you, for example, compare your situation, let's say in the West compared to someone that is in a war-like scenario where he literally sees his parents get killed. Well, what is like the level of trauma that this individual has? Is it like 10 times more than you because you were born in the West and your trauma is maybe just related to your parents or related to a specific bullying event? And I'm not saying this is the case for everyone in the West, but let's say this is the case for this example. How much worse is it for that guy? Does it mean that for this guy it's so bad because of the, the trauma, how strong it was that now is going to just essentially not be able to even function? But we don't see that. We actually see functioning individuals. We see this in the tsunami in 2004 in Indonesia. We see people that just recovered and moved on, that go back to their work, that go back to building families. Were they permanently damaged? To a certain extent, of course. But if we use the word damage, if we use the word trauma, that has obviously nowadays a negative connotation to it, at least when it comes to an individual's ability to really move on and change their lives. When we use those words that, of course, like I said, imply negative things, imply a loss of I mean, maybe not loss of control, but implies that, okay, this guy will be permanently altered and you wouldn't be able to do certain tasks and do certain things that will require, let's say, for example, confidence, because he can't have confidence, or at least his ability to be confident will be severely damaged because of what happened in the past. When we use these, okay, And we say, this is the reason why this individual can't do certain things, then we just create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, there is objectively the impact, but it's also on top of that, the self-fulfilling prophecy, which can be much stronger. And just on the topic of trauma, I'll just add this, that we've seen, and I talked about this in one of my videos on YouTube, we've seen that for 40% of people with substance abuse issues have some form of trauma, depression, anxiety. The rest, the 60%, they live normal happy lives without significant trauma. And we see in the Surgeon General's 2016 report, okay, and another 2016 report findings that indicate that only 20% of people with substance abuse have trauma or mental health issues. So we need to be really careful when we use the word trauma. So because I'm not— I'm saying this, guys, because it's not just about like porn usage. It's about do you want to live your life to the fullest? By fullest, I mean do you want to actually live the life that God designed for you? Do you want to live your life and say, okay, I am in control of this, therefore there is the possibility that I can really create the life that I desire, or I can work to achieve the things that I want to achieve, to maybe build that family, or do I want to say, uh, or do I want to believe, let's say, that I can't really do those things, or that the likelihood that I actually achieve those things is going to be much lower because of what happened in the past? And this is where I really, really want to wake up people. And I'm not judging people. I— my students, a lot of the times they come up to me, they say, Samir Gardner, "this thing happened in the past, my dad never supported me, my mom, she laughed at me, she put me down," and I sympathize with them and I empathize with them. And I think that this is horrible what they've done, okay? And I've went through my own, you can say, trauma to a certain extent. But I said, and I believe that the benefits that I'll gain from kind of moving on from that, from saying this is, yeah, this is what happened in the past. Yes, it did. It does still have an impact on me till this day. I'll tell you right now, being truly honest, when people bullied me, still to this day, in the back of my mind, I think, man, I'm going to get back at them. Of course, it was much, much, much stronger back then, especially when I first found out about self-improvement 5 years ago, when when I first found out that I could actually improve myself and that there was hope that I could live my dream life, that I could change my life around, that I didn't have to be this guy that was going to be bullied anymore. And still to this day, I have like a small, you can say like residue of that. Like I still think, oh yeah, I want to make sure that I can get back, of course not get back like physically, but in a sense of showing that I'm, becoming successful, and I'm working on that, okay? But it is very small, okay? This is what I'll tell you. But what I can tell you, okay, is that the things that happen as a byproduct of bullying, like self-esteem, okay? Like thinking that, oh, no one wants to be friends with me, okay? And confidence overall, being able to express myself without being laughed at. Because this was a belief. It's like, if I express myself like back then, I would maybe like back then get laughed at, get insulted, made fun of. Well, what you need to understand is that if you think, okay, if like, let's say in my case, it's like, okay, I can't really participate in social interactions where there's the possibility that if I express myself, I'm going to be laughed at. What would happen? I would not even indulge in any social interactions, or I would do my best to stay away from them, or to at least not even express myself fully. But guess what? Because I said, you know what, yeah, that's— I do feel that, but let me just put it to the side for now. Let me work on my life. Let me go and experience different things. And this is the key. When you experience— and this is something that a lot of people lack, sadly, in the NoFap space. You need independent experience, okay? There's a lack of independent experience for a lot of people. They just rely on the YouTube videos to learn how to change their mindsets. But if they were to go out there and do things that will actually change their mindset, the mindset change will be much, much, much stronger, okay? But of course, I'm not denying that there's value also in changing your mind through reading or watching videos. I'm recording this podcast for for this specific reason. But what you need to understand, okay, yes, having a good childhood, quote unquote good, because of course there are negative events that will happen, but let's say that you interpret it as good or that most people will say, okay, this is a good childhood. Your parents were good to you. You didn't go through any like major traumatic events. What it does, it does like mean that, oh, now you can't have trauma, or you can't have like the symptoms of, or the effects, the negative effects that, uh, that people that have trauma have. It just means that, okay, maybe now you'll have the confidence. And let's say in relation to porn, it doesn't mean that, okay, because you have trauma, you're going to watch porn. A good childhood, okay, what it does is it might give you maybe the confidence, maybe the tools, the skills to deal with addiction. But trauma does not cause addiction. Maybe trauma means, okay, indirectly you don't know how to cope with certain things because you never really worked on yourself, because you believe that this trauma really impacted you and you, you really didn't try to experience different things, or you didn't try to change your mindset because this really had a major impact on you. But it doesn't cause trauma. I mean, we see it with studies, okay? And this is the thing, what we need to understand is, and this is the question I want to ask you guys, it's okay, why can't you grow from trauma? Why can't you grow from trauma? Why can't you say, okay, this happened in the past, can I actually use that to my advantage? Can I use the bullying? Can I use my parents putting me down? Can I use horrible events that happened to me to my advantage so I can make something out of those things? And you'll see that suddenly, especially if you have hope, if you have the bigger picture in mind and you're like, okay, maybe I can use how I was bullied to as an opportunity to leave an impact on the world because when people will hear my story about how I used to be bullied and now where I am now and how I progressed, they will just be inspired and they will change their lives as a byproduct and maybe I'll be able to do good by God just by doing that. This is the thing, a lot of people feel hopeless. They think what happened in the past, I can't change myself, I don't think I can, achieve certain goals. I don't think I can pursue something more meaningful. And on top of that, I don't think that I can basically move on from my trauma. This is the worst thing that, that, that happens. So this is it for this episode. I hope this was helpful, and I'll see you guys then.