THE MEN WE NEED - PART TWO

REVIEW PART ONE

“Masculinity Is about Taking Responsibility” ~ Brandt Hansen

“Masculinity is about taking responsibility. We naturally respect men who take responsibility for themselves.

We have even more respect for those who go beyond themselves to their families. And we have immense respect for men who take responsibility for those well outside their own homes.

We are “masculine” not to the extent that we body-build or achieve sexual conquests or fix stuff, but to the extent that we are faithful to the job of being humble, consistent, dedicated keepers of the garden.

Just as Adam’s failure was devastating, our failures to fill this role have been devastating”.

“The vision is this: We men are at our best when we are “keepers of the garden.”

This means we are protectors and defenders and cultivators.

We are at our best when we champion the weak and vulnerable.

We are at our best when we use whatever strength we have to safeguard the innocent and provide a place for people to thrive.

This is the job Adam was given: keeper of the garden”. ~ Hansen, Brant. The Men We Need

SIX DECISIONS THAT WILL SET YOU APART

Decision One -Forsake the Fake and Relish the Real

Proverbs 16:25 KJV 1900

25 There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, But the end thereof are the ways of death.

Proverbs 14:12 MSG

12 There’s a way of life that looks harmless enough; look again—it leads straight to hell.

Proverbs 16:25 TPT

25 Before every person there is a path that seems like the right one to take, but it leads straight to hell!

“Pornography and sex with plastic are the obvious examples of taking something great, something beautifully life-giving and relational, and then, abraca-presto, turning it into soul-killing loneliness”.

“My sin isn’t sin because it’s on a random list of activities that God just doesn’t happen to like. My sin is sin because it stops me from being who I’m supposed to be and what I could have been. It’s a shortcut that leads away from the kingdom of God, where I can flourish, to a different kingdom—the kingdom of me”. ~ Hansen, Brant. The Men We Need

Lust

"Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed." ~ The Great Divorce

Women

"We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he "wants a woman." Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want.

"He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).

"Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give." ~ The Four Loves

Masturbation

"For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back; sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides.

"And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman.

"For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no woman can rival.

"Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover; no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity.

"In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself. . . . After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little dark prison we are all born in.

Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison."

Personal Letter From Lewis to Keith Masson (found in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3)

According to urologist Dr. Carlo Foresta, the number of high school teenagers reporting low sexual desire increased 600 percent between 2004 and 2013. There was a pronounced difference between frequent porn users and infrequent ones.2 Why? What on earth happened between 2004 and 2013? Wild guess: smartphones. ~ Hansen, Brant. The Men We Need

There’s an online community at Reddit strictly about giving up porn, and more than 700,000 people belong to it. It’s refreshing to read. The stories of what happens when guys get their minds away from porn are encouraging. One seventeen-year-old writes: I went from an introvert to an extrovert: not overnight, of course, but it was a slow process of getting more and more confidence to go out and not worry about talking to random strangers, and making new friends. . . . This has made life much, much easier for me.

From others on the Reddit forum: I found a girl who actually made me a man. She realised me, how I was irresponsible towards my family. I started spending time with my family and being that son again. [On the benefits of going 284 days without porn.] I feel happier, more relaxed, less like I need a hit of dopamine. . . . I feel more in control of my life now. I had serious anger issues [when using porn]. . . . The two are DEFINITELY related.

Watching porn . . . changes our brain’s chemical makeup so much that irritation/anger becomes a dominant emotion. [After going ninety days without porn.] I can feel more emotions, I’m more confident . . . I’m more motivated for school. ~ Hansen, Brant. The Men We Need

The Dopamine Seeking-Reward Loop

Or, "Why can't I stop scrolling on my app feeds?"

The "Seeking" Brain Chemical

Dopamine was originally thought of as critical in the "pleasure" systems of the brain. It was thought that dopamine makes you feel enjoyment and pleasure, thereby motivating you to seek out certain behaviors, such as food, sex, and drugs. But then research began to show that dopamine is also critical in causing seeking behavior. Dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases your general level of arousal and your goal-directed behavior. Dopamine makes you curious about ideas and fuels your searching for information.

Two systems

According to researcher Kent Berridge, there are two systems, the "wanting" and the "liking" and these two systems are complementary. Dopamine is part of the wanting system. It propels you to take action. The liking system makes you feel satisfied and therefore pause your seeking. But the dopamine wanting system is stronger than the liking system. You tend to seek more than you are satisfied. You can get into a dopamine loop. If your seeking isn't turned off at least for a little while, then you start to run in an endless loop.

The scrolling dopamine loop

When you bring up the feed on one of your favorite apps the dopamine loop has become engaged. With every photo you scroll through, headline you read, or link you go to you are feeding the loop which just makes you want more. It takes a lot to reach satiation, and in fact you might never be satisfied. Chances are what makes you stop is that someone interrupts you. It turns out the dopamine system doesn't have satiety built in.

Anticipatory rewards and pavlovian cues

The dopamine system is especially sensitive to "cues" that a reward is coming (remember Ivan Pavlov?). If there is a small, specific cue that signifies that something is going to happen, that sets off our dopamine system. So when there is a sound (auditory cue) or a visual cue that a notification has arrived, that cue enhances the addictive effect. It's not the reward itself that keeps the dopamine loop going; it's the anticipation of the reward. Robert Sapolsky talks about this anticipation/dopamine connection in his research.

Can you get out of the loop?

The combination of dopamine release in the brain plus a conditioned response with motor movement (the swipe with finger or thumb), makes this dopamine loop hard to stop. One way you can get some control is to create a counter-movement—a physical movement you do that becomes its own conditioned response. For example, my counter movement conditioned response is that when I realize I'm in a dopamine loop I immediately press the home button and place the phone face side down. If you can come up with a physical movement that becomes a conditioned response you can at least break the dopamine seeking-reward loop once it has started.

Arousal addiction symptoms are easily mistaken for such things as ADHD, social anxiety, depression, concentration problems, performance anxiety, OCD, and a host of others. Now, healthcare providers often assume that these conditions are primary, perhaps the cause of addiction, but never really the result of an addiction. As a consequence, they often medicate these guys without really inquiring about whether they have an internet addiction. So guys never realize they can overcome these symptoms simply by changing their behavior. ~ Hansen, Brant. The Men We Need