For sex, porn, and love addicts, digital devices can be dangerous, providing instant and seemingly endless access to porn, hookup apps, social media flirtations, webcam encounters, prostitutes, virtual reality sex games, and more. For this reason, any person hoping to recover from sex, porn, and/or love addiction absolutely must install a “parental control”
Step Seven: Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. In steps four, five, and six we identified our characters defects and became willing to live without them. Step seven is the logical continuation of that effort, where we begin the process of actually ridding ourselves of these shortcomings. If you believe in a Higher Power,
Many recovering addicts become so focused on the work of recovery that they forget to have fun. Usually this is because their only real goal early in the process is staying sober. While this is an admirable objective, it doesn’t exactly provide them with direction and meaning. Because of this, when the shiny new adventure
Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. The Alcoholics Anonymous authored book, The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, famously calls step six “the step that separates the men from the boys.” What the AA folks mean by this is that compiling a list of one’s character defects and then becoming
Early this year, David Fawcett, author of Lust, Men, and Meth: A Gay Man’s Guide to Sex and Recovery, and I conducted a seminar on the links between sex addiction and substance addiction – in particular methamphetamine abuse. David is an expert on meth addiction, especially in the gay community, and I am
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. After completing your fourth step, you suddenly find yourself staring at step five. Step five is one of the simplest steps to work. However, many recovering addicts approach it with dread. And that is a perfectly understandable feeling
In the last several of years, a small sub-faction of therapists, primarily those who label themselves “sexologists,” have publicly and vociferously argued that sex addiction is not a real disorder. Most recently this occurred with a wildly misinformed article published in The Therapist. (If you’re curious, you can find that article here.) Interestingly, these
Step Four: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. For many recovering addicts, step four is a huge sticking point in their recovery. The idea of taking a long, hard look at themselves and their behavior just isn’t appealing – especially if they’re still engaging in the type of denial that externalizes
Sadly, there are men and women who engage in same-gender sexual and romantic behaviors who think that means they must be sex, porn, or love addicted. Generally, these individuals are not happy with the fact that they are sexually and romantically interested in their own gender – usually because their family, culture, and/or religion has
In previous postings I have discussed the importance of Steps 1 and 2 and a few ways in which those steps can be worked. To recap, Step 1 helps you understand the nature and consequences of your addiction, and Step 2 helps you understand and accept that if you want to establish and maintain sobriety,