Last Update: 01.17.22

This program — as yet unnamed — will consist of (1) Daily email (2) Weekly Accountability Group, and optional (3) Weekly Coaching (for additional cost)

(1) Daily Email
This program at its core is content that will come to a person via email every weekday, with a summary — and a video — coming on Saturday. The emails will be fairly short, and include a recommended “action step” to take, and will also include a link to something more in depth … “for further reading” if that’s what someone wants to do.

The program is built around a multi-faceted understanding of what’s required for ongoing, long-term recovery and a life of emotional and spiritual health for today’s men. It’s based on 12 Keys to lasting recovery — or maybe better said: “12 Keys to Harnessing our Sex Drive in Today’s Out of Control World — by developing our mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being.”

The program content will focus on these 12 keys — developing each of them over the course of a month — so it will include a full year of content. The plan is that in each subsequent year, participants can continue in the program, and go through the lessons again, with added material and further reading added to the previous year’s lesson for that day.

Also, each week I’d include a link to some recovery, sexual health, or spiritual growth video. It might be done by me, but it also might be a link to someone else’s material.

(2) Weekly Accountability Group
This is less fully developed, and will require some initiative on the part of people who participate. I’ll provide a guide for group meeting — an accountability group consists of 3-5 people. Part of the process of the program is to invite others to join you, and create your own local, in-person accountability. The group meetings will mainly be for checking in, supporting one another, and holding each other accountable for continuing to do the work.

(3) Optional Weekly Coaching Group
This will take a similar form to the group I currently run, although it may grow larger. People will be able to bring issues and questions, and then they’ll be given the chance to get coaching around whatever the need or issue is for them.

NAME OF THE PROGRAM

Like so many things, even the name of the program is not set in stone. I’m thinking of calling it “The Complete Man Project” … and the emails I put together to show you use this name with a logo. The idea behind “Complete Man Project” is WHOLENESS as the end game of this journey. We can’t overcome sexual struggles unless we do the work of moving towards emotional, spiritual, mental, and even physical well-being … all these elements come together. And it’s also true that we will struggle to be complete men if we don’t get our sexuality under control

Possible name ideas:

  • Complete Man Project
  • Spiritual Warrior Project
  • Whole Man Project
  • Great Soul Project
  • 100 Percent Man

WHO IS THE TARGET:

This program is for Christian men who recognize that they need support to help them deal with today’s “tsunami of sexuality” being thrown at us. It is for sex addicts, but also people for people I like to call “sexual strugglers” … people who may not fit the diagnostic criteria for addiction, but struggle to keep healthy and maintain boundaries around their sexual habits (especially, but not limited to pornography use

I should also add that this program is for people who are “on the fence” spiritually speaking, but yet open to hearing teaching that comes from a Christian perspective.

It is NOT for people who are hostile or dismissive of religion, Christianity, or spirituality. But also … it is NOT for rigid or super-conservative Christians either. I will talk about the challenge some people have with doubts, and I will incorporate teachings from secular writers, and writers from other religious traditions too. If that would freak people out, then this wouldn’t work for them.

WHAT ARE THE 12 KEYS THAT THE PROGRAM WILL BE BUILT AROUND?

These are the 12 keys, and the content that the program will be built around. You will notice that there are two topic areas that are not generally found in traditional sex addiction recovery material — physical health, and being a complete man. The physical health issue is often dealt with in treatment centers (but not support groups), and the issue of healthy maleness is becoming increasingly complex today, and thus needs added attention.

  1. A vision and plan for sobriety and sexual sanity — not sexual anorexia. Creating a plan to control, not suppress your sexual drive. This would include getting clear about your motivation for recovery: compassion. This issue is not simply your own well-being, but how that will shape others as well
  2. An environment that supports recovery — establishing boundaries and ending isolation
  3. Finding real community — Getting out of isolation, and getting real support, and positive accountability
  4. Living with emotional awareness — moving from monochrome to Technicolor, and understanding your deep needs
  5. Making peace with your past — You can’t fix this problem without getting below the surface
  6. Authentic and integrated faith — The spiritual path of restoration: letting go of illusion and finding authentic faith
  7. Managing your anxiety and stress — Create a life that is sustainable; one you don’t need to escape from
  8. Healthy relation to one’s partner — Your partner is not the problem or the solution: the promise and perils of intimacy
  9. Purpose: Recovery is about Addition and not just subtraction — a vision for what you want in your life
  10. Cultivating your physical energy and health
  11. Staying motivated and vigilant — Staying vigilant: pursuing recovery as a marathon, not a sprint
  12. Being a complete man — being a warrior, owning your manhood, and helping others to do the same

PRINCIPLES THE PROGRAM IS BASED ON:

  • Multi-faceted: We are multi-faceted people, addiction is a multi-faceted problem, and therefore recovery must be multifaceted, if it’s going to last.
  • Daily: If recovery is going to work — and going to last — we need to keep it in our conscious awareness. Our enemy is distraction … so we do a little something each day to keep us focused on our commitment to sobriety and well-being.
  • Action: Recovery is about what we do, not what we know. Most people assume that recovery will come together for them if they can learn some new concept, or discover some secret about their past. Not so. It’s much more elementary than that — doing the things you need to do to stay emotionally and spiritually healthy so that you can stay sober.
  • Gradualism: Lasting change comes about by consistent steps, and for the most part, radical resolves lose their interest after a few weeks. As Darren Hardy puts it in his book The Compound Effect: “Your only path to success is through a continuum of mundane, unsexy, unexciting, and sometimes difficult daily disciplines compounded over time. Know, too, that the results, the life, and the lifestyle of your dreams can be yours when you put the Compound Effect to work for you. If you use the principles outlined in the The Compound Effect, you will create your fairy-tale ending.”

HOW MUCH WILL IT COST?

This is another one of my questions. I have two considerations:
(a) It should be cheap enough that people on the fence would be willing to try it, and people would be willing to continue doing it long term … it should provide such value that someone would be stupid not to do it.
(b) It needs to be expensive enough that people would actually do the work and DO IT. If they don’t follow through, by reading the emails and doing the reflections, they won’t get results, and it won’t work.

Right now I’m leaning towards $19 a month. This would give you the emails every day, and a video on Saturday, and an accountability group with several others each week.

For people who want to do the coaching group option … I’m thinking maybe $67 a month? I don’t know about this part.

DELIVERY SYSTEM:

My plan is to send an email pretty early in the morning every weekday with the content. Then on Saturday, people would get a link to the page for that week, which would have all the email content, plus a link to the video.

Another question I have is whether it would be good to set this up to be delivered via telephone text. People would get a text with a link to go to that day’s content. I’m leery of doing this, because it would mean learning a new system for me — and probably more cost for the technology — but if it would make a big difference in terms of use, it would be worth it. Whatever would make a guy actually DO THE WORK!

TAKE THE SURVEY:

Here’s the link where you can take a survey — using survey monkey — about the things I talk about here:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3T68PHJ