Hi there. Welcome to the Mathias Chabarka podcast. My name is Matthias. I'm a psychotherapist from

Spokane, Washington. And this is a podcast about mental health and moving towards what's meaningful,

despite hardship. Today we're talking about pornography. This is a podcast that I don't

inspired a lot of conversation when I originally recorded kind of the main lecture of it. And I've

just kind of seen this topic more generally inspire a lot of intense emotion across the board. Like

whether you're someone who, I don't know, has a porn dependence or a porn addiction and maybe

you were scrolling through these podcast titles and you saw this title and you're like, okay,

yep, that's me. I need some help. And so you clicked on it looking for some tools. You know,

I know doubt that there's probably a lot of emotion tied up in this for you, whether that shame or,

I don't know, past trauma or how that's affecting your relationship. Like maybe you're in a

relationship and your partner looks at porn and you're kind of situated where you prefer that they

don't, but you don't really know how to bring it up or it's kind of been a place of contention.

It's been a place of conflict for you both and you're trying to kind of figure out what place

porn takes up in your relationship if any. Maybe you're someone who doesn't see why everyone makes

such a big deal about this and you're kind of just listening out of curiosity because it seems

like everyone has such intense feelings around this and that's the truth because, well, it makes

sense if you think about it. It's sexuality is so personal. You know, and so when we talk about

ways that we interface with our sexuality and even ways that we converse with our companions

sexually, like there's, there's just a lot of personal, like deeply emotional spaces that this

conversation, I don't know, takes place in. And so it makes sense to me. It makes sense to me that

people either intensely criticize or are deeply connected to the conversation around struggling

with porn and maybe getting off porn. And so that's kind of what this is about. I mean, it's not

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