Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. From step four onward, the twelve steps are primarily concerned with interpersonal relations—how you interact in and with the wider world. In a nutshell, you are asked to: Look back on your life and see where
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
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
Robert Weiss LCSW, CSAT-S is a digital-age intimacy and relationships expert specializing in infidelity and addictions—in particular sex, porn, and love addiction. An internationally acknowledged clinician, he has served as a subject expert for multiple media outlets including The Oprah Winfrey Network, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, and