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🎙️ Why You Relapse: The 3 Hidden Reasons Men Fall Back Into Porn
Most men think relapse is random — or worse, that it means they’re “broken,” “bad,” or “addicted forever.” In this short, power-packed teaching, counselor and coach Zack Carter breaks down the real reasons high-achieving Christian men keep turning back to pornography, even when life is going well.
Zack explains the three forces that drive relapse — Relief, Reward, and Response — and shows how emotional triggers, environmental cues, and even positive events can quietly pull you back into old patterns. More importantly, he gives you a clear, actionable plan to replace porn with meaningful habits that build strength, purpose, and momentum.
If you’ve been stuck in shame or confusion around relapse, this is five minutes that will finally give you clarity.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
Why most relapses aren’t caused by weakness — but by predictable patterns
How negative emotions like stress, loneliness, and boredom trigger urges
How positive emotions like excitement, success, and celebration can also lead to relapse
Why your environment (rooms, sounds, routines) trains your brain to expect porn
How Pavlov’s experiment explains your own automatic urges
A simple exercise to build a weekly “replacement plan” that actually works
The exact strategy Zack uses with clients to break Saturday-night patterns
How to shift from coping with life to living the life you actually want
📘 Free Book for Men Who Want to Grow
Get Mark’s free book “7 Traps That Keep Christian Men Stuck”
👉 https://escapethecagenow.com/subscribe/
🎧 Prefer audio-only? Listen here:
https://escapethecagenow.com/podcast
📚 Mark’s Books
Escape the Cage and Lion Devotions
👉 https://escapethecagenow.com/books
Lion Counseling Merch
Faith-forward, strength-focused apparel for men
👉 https://escapethecagenow.com/merch
📞 Want help breaking free for good?
Book a free 20-minute consult with our team:
👉 https://escapethecagenow.com/call/
💬 Comment below:
Which healthy activities help you replace urges with real purpose?
Share one thing you’ll add to your schedule this week.
About the Lion Counseling Podcast
The Lion Counseling Podcast helps high-achieving Christian men overcome anxiety, anger, trauma, porn use, burnout, and relationship struggles using EMDR-informed counseling, practical psychology, and biblical wisdom. Each episode blends honest conversations, evidence-based strategies, and Christ-centered insight to help you rise, heal, and lead with strength. New episodes drop every Tuesday.
Most men think relapse is random — or worse, that it means they’re “broken,” “bad,” or “addicted forever.” In this short, power-packed teaching, counselor and coach Zack Carter breaks down the real reasons high-achieving Christian men keep turning back to pornography, even when life is going well.
Zack explains the three forces that drive relapse — Relief, Reward, and Response — and shows how emotional triggers, environmental cues, and even positive events can quietly pull you back into old patterns. More importantly, he gives you a clear, actionable plan to replace porn with meaningful habits that build strength, purpose, and momentum.
If you’ve been stuck in shame or confusion around relapse, this is five minutes that will finally give you clarity.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
Why most relapses aren’t caused by weakness — but by predictable patterns
How negative emotions like stress, loneliness, and boredom trigger urges
How positive emotions like excitement, success, and celebration can also lead to relapse
Why your environment (rooms, sounds, routines) trains your brain to expect porn
How Pavlov’s experiment explains your own automatic urges
A simple exercise to build a weekly “replacement plan” that actually works
The exact strategy Zack uses with clients to break Saturday-night patterns
How to shift from coping with life to living the life you actually want
📘 Free Book for Men Who Want to Grow
Get Mark’s free book “7 Traps That Keep Christian Men Stuck”
👉 https://escapethecagenow.com/subscribe/
🎧 Prefer audio-only? Listen here:
https://escapethecagenow.com/podcast
📚 Mark’s Books
Escape the Cage and Lion Devotions
👉 https://escapethecagenow.com/books
Lion Counseling Merch
Faith-forward, strength-focused apparel for men
👉 https://escapethecagenow.com/merch
📞 Want help breaking free for good?
Book a free 20-minute consult with our team:
👉 https://escapethecagenow.com/call/
💬 Comment below:
Which healthy activities help you replace urges with real purpose?
Share one thing you’ll add to your schedule this week.
About the Lion Counseling Podcast
The Lion Counseling Podcast helps high-achieving Christian men overcome anxiety, anger, trauma, porn use, burnout, and relationship struggles using EMDR-informed counseling, practical psychology, and biblical wisdom. Each episode blends honest conversations, evidence-based strategies, and Christ-centered insight to help you rise, heal, and lead with strength. New episodes drop every Tuesday.
Creators and Guests
What is Lion Counseling Podcast?
The Lion Counseling Podcast helps men escape the cages that hold them back and become the Lions they were created to be. It exists to help men obtain success, purpose, happiness, and peace in their career and personal lives. The podcast is hosted by the founder of Lion Counseling, Mark Odland (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Certified EMDR Therapist), and Zack Carter (Counselor and Coach with Lion Counseling). In their podcasts, they address a variety of topics relevant to men, including: mental health, relationships, masculinity, faith, success, business, and self-improvement.
Welcome to the Lion Counseling Podcast. My name is Zach Carter, counselor and coach. Most of my clients who come to me looking to quit pornography tell me the same thing when I ask them why they think they had a relapse. I don't know, it was random. I'm a bad person.
Zack Carter:I'm an addict. All those are very vague beliefs as to why the relapse happened. In the next five minutes, I'm going to give you the three real reasons why you're relapsing and how to fix them. Be sure to stay until the end. Reason number one, relief.
Zack Carter:Most people have relapses when life just starts to get hard. Work gets stressful, arguments with your wife, financial issues. There are very common negative emotions that can crop up to cause individuals to relapse. Anxiety, boredom, famously the acronym HALT, hungry, angry, lonely, tired, procrastination, depression. So many negative things can cause us to want to relapse.
Zack Carter:But Zach, I already kind of knew that porn could be used as a coping mechanism for life. What most people don't know is the number two reason for relapses, and that's reward. When you get over a long week, when you accomplish that big goal, when you're done with school, what often happens is that we want to find ways to reward ourselves. For some people that's food, other people it's video games, other people it's hanging with friends, and for some people, whether they realize it or not, it's pornography. I can't tell you how many clients I've had come to me after a long vacation and they have a relapse right when they get back home.
Zack Carter:They're like, Zach, I don't understand. Life was going great. I just had this awesome time with my family. And then I relapsed. That's usually because we want to celebrate things that we've done, intensify good feelings, extend good feelings.
Zack Carter:And so if you're coming back from that vacation, it's, Hey, I don't want this vacation to end. And so I just want to make it last one, two, three, four, five more hours, however long you end up watching porn. So don't pay attention to just the negative emotion. Also pay attention to the positive emotion. The last reason for going into the screen and watching pornography is number three, response.
Zack Carter:Now it's a response to our environment. So famously, years and years ago, there was a guy named Pavlov. Pavlov ran this experiment where he brought a bunch of dogs into his lab. And what he would do is that he would ring a bell and he'd bring out a plate of food for these dogs each day. Ring a bell, bring out food, ring a bell, bring out food.
Zack Carter:And what happened was those dogs began to hear that bell and associate that sound with getting fed. So what Pavlov ended up doing is ringing the bell, not bringing out food, and then measuring their saliva to see if they had an increase in saliva. And sure enough, they did. The same thing can happen to you when you have a parent, a roommate, a spouse leave and you hear that front door close. It's kind of like that bell.
Zack Carter:The brain then says, Oh, I'm alone. When I'm alone, watch porn. It's time to watch porn. And it happens like that. It's not just emotional responses that can cause us to have urges.
Zack Carter:It's also environmental. So not just sounds, but also being in certain environments in the home. For instance, being in a bedroom, being in a bed, being in a bathroom, certain couches, wherever you tend to relapse, that area is going to begin to be triggering for your brain. Pay attention to relief, reward and response. Usually with my clients, it's a combination of the three.
Zack Carter:What we want to do is we want to replace porn with healthier activities. I'll give you an example. I had a client who was struggling on Saturday nights. And so I asked him a very famous counseling question. It's called the miracle question.
Zack Carter:What would you do if you had an ideal Saturday night? The guy thought about it for a minute and he said, you know, I would go out with some buddies. We'd go see a movie, go out to eat after. So I was like, great. Let's set that as your goal.
Zack Carter:So as we began to set this as his goal, his urges on Saturday nights vanished. They just disappeared. So we replaced the negative emotions that were triggering, the positive emotions that were triggering, the environmental triggers, all of them. We replaced it with what he actually wanted to do in his life. So what you have to do is you have to get together a list of activities that you really enjoy doing instead of porn that you can go do.
Zack Carter:So let's do that right now. Pull out a sheet of paper, list three things that you can do that are healthy activities that you love to do. Pick one, plug it into your schedule, and then start trying that for the next week or two. As you begin to do that activity, if you start to do it consistently, all right, start doing that second one, start doing that third one. What we want to do is we want to replace that time spent watching pornography with time spent doing the things you enjoy doing.
Zack Carter:If this was helpful for you, like and subscribe and be sure to comment underneath the video. What healthy activities do you love to fill your time with? And let's have a discussion on how we can begin to replace unhealthy activities with healthier ones.