I believe my biggest pitfall has been loneliness and/or fear. Being a sex addict and same-sex attracted as well as being the spouse of a sex addict can create a lot of fear and lonliness. Acting out is hard to resist when it seems to be your only "friend." Making contact with the outside world on a daily basis is a must for me.

I believe the greatest danger in my recovery has been the desire to "have it all behind me". When I am more humble, acknowledging my weaknesses to God, my wife and myself and actively working on some area of self-improvement, I feel the safest in my recovery.

I would say the single biggest obstacle for me was misdefining my boundaries. When I said that my battle was against pornography and masturbation, then I would sometimes take myself as close to those lines as possible. Now that I understand that my real enemies are compulsive behavior and lust, I am staying away from the edges. If you don't know your enemy, you cannot fight it effectively.

Although I still do not feel like I am completely recovered, in the past my biggest downfall was perhaps two-fold:

1. Allowing for the "little" things. "Oh, it's okay to look at these pictures...these women are fully clothed." That would only start me down the road that eventually led me to acting out again
2. Not recognizing why I act out and what I was trying to fulfill. I would wallow in my depression and self-pity or in the excitement of the arousal that I would not realize that I was only trying to fulfill a need.

I feel that the biggest mistake that I made for so many years--about 24--was trying to go it alone. Pridefully, I figured that I could just be tough and force myself to stop. That is how I was raised--tough, independent, and smart, and in retrospect I can see foolish. As soon as I accepted that I really had a problem that was too big for me alone I was able to turn it over to the Lord. My new knowlegde of my weakness allowed me to finally rely on Him and grow closer to Him. That is when my heart was able to change. The change was rather quick and has been fairly easy ever since.

My single biggest stumbling block is when I let Christ out of the formula of recovery. Without His help and my dependant, willing heart on that help, my own efforts have proved vain every time. It results when I forget to place the first commandment first, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all they heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength."

What I have found for me is that all of these things were connected to some things...pride, coveting, and not loving myself. I think that coveting is the foundation of it all...the more I ponder this subject...I had not thought much about coveting in the past....I felt I did not covet, because I was not jealous enough to hate others like the Cain and Abel situation. Anytime we fantasize, and mope about our lot in life...we covet! Fantasy is what leads to many troubles. The thought always comes before the acting out....and fantasy IS coveting!

The biggest obstacle was my pride in that I thought I was recovered and could indulge in this or that with no harm. It was almost like I thought that because I had gotten baptized, gone on a mission, gone to the temple, served in a calling or two, that I had some special right to indulge in a degree of worldliness. It was almost like I believed that God owed me. I was using outward things to deceive myself into thinking that they saved me while my heart was not changed.

My biggest obstacle has been to sabotage myself through distractions: I will identify my triggers, then identify daily exercises to strengthen spiritual muscle, be diligent for several days, begin to feel good about myself, then relax (laziness) on a couple of things, then it snowballs, then I fall back into the cycle.

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