Let’s talk about milestones. In your purity journey, you can celebrate several types of milestones. Whether you are just starting your recovery or are a wise veteran, you can always find something to celebrate.
Let’s stretch our understanding of milestones. There is more to celebrate than we realize…
“Big Sobriety” Milestones – These are the milestones we are most familiar with. When someone is able to stop their unwanted sexual behavior for a month, a year, or multiple years, it should be celebrated. If you’ve been a part of a 12-step program, this is when you get your next colored chip. Start with a behavior (looking at porn, masturbating, sexting, etc.) and build your sobriety a day at a time until you start hitting the biggies.
“Breaking the Ice” Milestones – When you reach out for help in a new direction, that’s a milestone. It takes courage to visit the counselor for the first time, to talk to your minister for the first time, to attend an X3group meeting, or to go to a counseling intensive workshop. Chances are, our solutions to our sexual struggles in the past haven’t worked. We need to be “breaking the ice” with new sources of support.
“Secret Sharing” Milestones – One of the hardest things to do is come out of isolation and share your struggles. It’s also hard to share with a new person, maybe your parents, a best friend, or a youth pastor. I think you should have a mini-celebration when you break the silence. Healing comes when we reach out to God and others for help. When you share, your secret loses some of its power over you. How great is that?!
“Hard Conversation” Milestones – You may not think a hard conversation is something to celebrate, but when you have the courage to take responsibility for what you’ve done it’s a big step in your recovery. When you listen to your angry and hurt person instead of pushing them away, it’s a big deal. When you admit and apologize to someone you’ve hurt through your sexual behaviors, you’re making big progress. It sucks that we have to have hard conversations, have conflict, and deal with unforgiveness and bitterness, but it’s critical for sexual addiction recovery.
“Starting Over” Milestones – You always have a choice when it comes to your sobriety. You can continue to live in your sexual behaviors and shove God, your friends and your family away. You can choose to go dark if you want to. Hopefully, after a failure, you decide to get back up again and start over. We can celebrate recommitments and starting over as a milestone.
In our X3groups, we provide a safe atmosphere where people can talk about their struggles and be supported. We don’t judge; instead we surround each other with the love and grace of God. We celebrate milestones and we encourage. Whether our week was good, bad or ugly we can always point out something that is good about each guy.
Get into a group today and start celebrating milestones together.