Courses › The hour after
Yourself and your limits
The hour after
Shame and guilt are doing different jobs, and only one of them has an exit.
If you are reading this an hour after it happened, you are the person it was written for and you are not in the wrong place. There is nothing to count here and no streak to lose. Two things go outside a course, and quickly. If you are having thoughts that the world would be better without you, or that you are beyond forgiving, tell somebody today, because shame and secrecy together are what make that dangerous. And if any of this has involved a child, there is specialist help, it exists to be used, and there will not be one word of shaming from us. Lesson six has the routes for both.
What this course teaches
Cognitive behavioural work with compassion focused therapy, and urge surfing
The claim is that shame is the maintainer, not the brake. Shame is about the self and predicts more of the behaviour; guilt is about the act and does not. So the course works on the hour afterwards, and teaches riding an urge to its peak rather than fighting it.
Why this one
Shame and guilt measure separately and pull in opposite directions, which is a well replicated finding. How religious a person is predicts how addicted they believe themselves to be far better than it predicts how much they actually use, and that gap is the thing this course is built around.
What this course will not do
Addiction services, if this has taken over your day. There is no diagnosis of pornography addiction in the international classification, and this course does not invent one.
Six short lessons about the collapse that comes afterwards rather than about the act. It separates guilt, which is about what you did, from shame, which is about who you are, and shows why the second one feeds the loop instead of stopping it. It sets out what tawbah actually asks for and what it does not ask for, corrects two of the most quoted lines on repentance, and works on the hour after, because that is the part that can be changed. Nothing in this course counts anything.
Who this is for
Anyone caught in the loop of doing this, hating themselves for it, and finding that the hating makes the next time closer rather than further away. Anyone whose repentance has started to feel like something they cannot stop doing. It assumes no clinical background and no training in the sacred sciences.
What this is not
This course does not run exposure or response prevention on you, and you should not build it for yourself. It will not tell you to notice an urge and hold out until it passes, it will not give you a timer or a delay exercise, and it will not tell you to say your tawbah once and then refuse to say it again. That last one is a real treatment for a real problem, it can be exactly right, and it belongs to a clinician who has assessed you, ideally with a scholar available. This course will not ask you to describe what you viewed or to write out your history. It gives no fatwa and no diagnosis, and it replaces neither a scholar nor a clinician.
The lessons
6- Where you left off. The hour afterThis starts where you actually are, which is afterwards, and not with a description of the act.7 min
- Shame and guilt are doing different jobsOne of them points at what you did. The other points at what you are. Only one of them has a way out.7 min
- What tawbah asks for, and what it does notRepentance is not a performance that has to be perfect, and there is no threshold of feeling bad enough.7 min
- Stopping the second thingThe one change in this course is not about the behaviour. It is about the hour that follows it.6 min
- What feeds itSecrecy, the night, and the counting apps that are doing the opposite of what you hired them for.6 min
- When this has become something elseWhat the actual diagnosis says, one sentence in it that matters enormously, and how to raise this safely.5 min
What this course is built on
- Qur'an 2:286, 3:135, 12:87, 15:56, 24:30 to 31, 39:53 to 54. Translation throughout: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004. 39:53 is quoted only together with 39:54, on the view that quoting either alone misrepresents the passage. 12:53 is deliberately not used, because it is regularly read as a self description by exactly the learner this course is written for. 4:17 to 18 is not used and is flagged for the scholar reviewer, because the reading that a repeated sin invalidates an earlier repentance needs a scholar rather than a course writer.
- Twohig MP, Crosby JM (2010). Acceptance and commitment therapy as a treatment for problematic internet pornography viewing. Behavior Therapy, 41(3), 285 to 295. Cited for the direction of its finding and for the rationale of the approach only. No effect sizes are published here because none were read off the paper.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 6069, 7507; Sahih Muslim 1695, 2590, 2744, 2749; Sunan Ibn Majah 4251. Only reports graded sound or good are used. Two widely quoted reports are named in lesson three and are not cited as evidence: Sunan Ibn Majah 4250, the one who repents is like one who never sinned, graded weak on sunnah.com, and Jami at-Tirmidhi 2499, which is the number usually given for a report that is sound at Sunan Ibn Majah 4251. Sahih al-Bukhari 2442 is not used here, because it concerns concealing the fault of another person, which is a related but distinct duty.
- Randles D, Tracy JL (2013). Nonverbal Displays of Shame Predict Relapse and Declining Health in Recovering Alcoholics. Clinical Psychological Science, 1(2), 149 to 155. Presented in the lesson as evidence about shame and relapse generally. The sample is small and is in alcohol dependence, not in pornography use.
- The three conditions of tawbah where the wrong is between a servant and Allah, in the formulation associated with al-Nawawi in Riyad as-Salihin, with a fourth added where the right of another person is involved. Given in lesson three as the standard summary. The exact wording and location were not read off the primary text in the research behind this course and must be checked by the scholar reviewer before publication.
- The abstinence violation effect, from the relapse prevention tradition associated with Marlatt and Gordon. Named as a model in lesson two and deliberately not cited, because the primary reference was not confirmed in the research behind this course.
- ICD-11, code 6C72, compulsive sexual behaviour disorder. Diagnostic requirements, including the requirement that distress arising entirely from moral judgements and disapproval about sexual impulses, urges or behaviours is not sufficient. The WHO browser at icd.who.int returned only its landing shell during the research pass, so this text was read off a code reference mirror rather than the WHO source. It must be checked against icd.who.int before publication.