1. Honesty, Self-knowledge and Commitment

Recovery begins with being honest with yourself, other people and God about your addiction. You take full responsibility for your addiction and your recovery, and you are committed to doing whatever it takes to recovery. It also means knowing your weaknesses. This means identifying the triggers and danger zones, which can lead to using porn, and developing the strategies to avoid falling.

2. Purifying Your Life

Healthy recovery obviously means ridding your life of all pornography and any access to it. This means destroying and throwing out any physical porn you may have – magazine, DVDs, catalogs, etc. It also means monitoring all use of technology with software, such as CovenantEyes. Moreover, it means making the commitment not to use technology/pornography to selfishly gratify ourselves. Anything that evenly remotely reminds you of pornography must be discarded.

3. Support and Accountability

Anyone who has been successful in recovery will admit that they could not do it alone. Healing and recovery always occur within community. Thus, you need to surround yourself with others who understand your struggles, will support you, and will keep you accountable to your program. Here is where support groups are crucial.

4. Counseling

In many ways, pornography use is just a symptom. Most people get into pornography as teenagers out of curiosity. However, what is it about the person who needs to keep going back to is over and over again? There is usually some deep emotional wounds that he is self-medicating with pornography. Often he has had the wounds for so long he doesn’t even know they’re there anymore. However, subconsciously he uses pornography to ease his pain. Through counseling these wounds can be identified and healed. This will lead to longer lasting sobriety. Unless the root causes of pornography use are identified and resolved, any sobriety will simply be “white-knuckling it.” Counseling is also needed for spouses to heal from the deep betrayal wounds they’ve endured. Counseling is also needed for couples to heal the wounds to their marriages caused by pornography.

5. Spiritual Plan

Anyone who has been successful in recovery will also tell you he couldn’t have done it without God’s help. It’s a known fact that faith-based recovery programs are far more effective than secular programs. With the Integrity Restored Program, we incorporate Catholic spirituality into the process. This includes daily payer, sacraments, spiritual direction, scripture and spiritual reading, retreats, etc. Fact is that you need God’s help! You need his love, strength and healing. It’s important to know that you are loved by God unconditionally. There is nothing you could do that could ever take away his love. He still wants you recover and will be there to help you.

6. Education

To recover from pornography addiction, you need to fill your heart and mind with the truth about pornography, addiction and recovery. The more you fill your heart and mind with the truth, the harder it will be to fall. Most of the people I’ve worked with have no idea what healthy sexuality and intimacy is about. Part of their education includes learning about these. It’s just as important to share the truth as it is to learn it. Thus, many men go on to teach others about the dangers of pornography. This reinforces their recovery.

7. Virtue

If you want to fight a vice, you do it with virtue. Initially recovery is about getting away from something – the drug. Eventually recovery becomes about what you are moving toward – a new and healthy life. It’s easier to get to this point when someone works on growing in virtue daily. This will help him to become the man God created him to be – a strong leader, provider and protector! This becomes his mission and he becomes excited about recovery and live.