All daily inspirations can be found in the book Sex and Porn Addiction Healing and Recovery. Used here with permission of the author.

Your opinions are your windows to the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in.

In some quarters, there is a fear that sex and porn addiction therapists are trying to be the ‘sex police,’ imposing moral, cultural, or religious values on sexuality. Sadly, this fear is not entirely ungrounded; there are indeed some moralistic or highly religious therapists who misuse and misapply the sex addiction diagnosis, using it to marginalize and pathologize sexual behaviors that don’t mesh with their personal or religious belief systems. Homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, recreational porn use, casual sex, polyamory, and fetishes—all of which fall well within the spectrum of ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ adult sexuality—have at times been misdiagnosed as sex or porn addiction. In reality, however, the things that turn a person on are completely unrelated to a sex or porn addiction diagnosis.

Task for Today
Think about your personal beliefs about the types of sex that are and are not healthy. Do your beliefs exactly match the beliefs of others in your life?

All daily inspirations can be found in the book Sex and Porn Addiction Healing and Recovery. Used here with permission of the author.

You can’t change what you refuse to confront.

In Step 6, you identified your character defects and became willing to live without them. Step 7 is the logical continuation of that effort. With Step 7, you begin the process of getting rid of those shortcomings. In most respects, this is a relatively straightforward procedure. You simply incorporate into your daily spiritual practice (prayer, affirmations, and whatever else it is that seems to work for you) a request that your Higher Power remove your character defects. If there are shortcomings that are particularly irksome to you at any given time, it is helpful to mention them specifically.

Task for Today
Pick a character defect you’d like to be rid of and ask your Higher Power to help you with that.

All daily inspirations can be found in the book Sex and Porn Addiction Healing and Recovery. Used here with permission of the author.

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

In sexual recovery, we create clear and concise sexual sobriety plans to define what sexual sobriety means for us and to provide ourselves with guidelines for living a healthier, happier life. These plans are written and signed as contracts to help us hold ourselves accountable to our commitments, particularly in the face of challenging circumstances. When we lack clearly written sexual boundaries, we are vulnerable to deciding in the moment that certain activities are OK for now even if they’ve been wildly problematic in the past. We need to remember that impulsive sexual decisions made without clear guidelines are what dragged us down in the first place, so it’s best not to leave any wiggle room in our sobriety plans.

Task for Today
Identify the loopholes and gray areas in your sexual sobriety plan and ask your therapist or sponsor to help you pin down more precise language.

All daily inspirations can be found in the book Sex and Porn Addiction Healing and Recovery. Used here with permission of the author.

Addicts are people who are trying to escape from a reality in which they are not.

Addiction is often referred to as a disease of perception. Even when the people around us are loving and supportive, we struggle to see it that way. Instead, we choose to feel abused and put-upon by others. In this way, we blame our desire to escape and dissociate (by using an addictive substance or an addictive behavior, such as sex or porn) on the attitudes and actions of other people, thereby using (and often exaggerating) external experiences and connections as a way to justify and validate our addictive behavior.

Task for Today
Think about the ways in which you perceive the world and other people. Are your perceptions accurate?

All daily inspirations can be found in the book Sex and Porn Addiction Healing and Recovery. Used here with permission of the author.

The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, it’s to schedule your priorities.

One recovering sex addict with a demanding job, a spouse, and three kids says that he still manages to make it to a 12-step meeting every day. For him, meetings are non-negotiable. No matter what else is going on in his life, he finds a meeting and gets there. This doesn’t mean life doesn’t occasionally happen in unexpected ways. A kid gets sick, a tire goes flat, the power goes out, etc. When faced with situations like these, the addict reminds himself that if he is not sober, he is no good to himself or anyone else. He says, “I have to fix myself before I can fix the world.”

Task for Today
Go to a meeting no matter what. And while you’re there, participate.

All daily inspirations can be found in the book Sex and Porn Addiction Healing and Recovery. Used here with permission of the author.

It is clear that we make our own misery.

In our addiction and as recovering people, we sometimes hurt the people we love by trying to ‘help them’ when we’re really trying to punish them or upset them. Usually, we do this when we feel ashamed, anxious, or depressed. What we want is attention and understanding for how we’re feeling, but instead of asking for a loved one to meet this need, we lash out, hoping to make the other person feel as terrible as we do. This odd and somewhat perverse tendency is not the sole purview of addicts and recovering addicts, but we do tend to engage in this behavior more often than ‘normies.’ And when we do, it pushes people away from us rather than bringing them closer, which is what we actually want from them. The more we are aware of this tendency, the more actions we can take to stop ourselves from doing it. Usually, the best possible action we can take is to tell our friends and family members what we’re thinking and feeling so they can respond with the love and empathy we want and need.

Task for Today
Tell the truth about what you are thinking and feeling. Notice how people respond when you do this.