Accountability Partner/Buddy

Please feel free to send me a message, via the conversation feature, or just build on the thread you have created here. Helping others has proven to be a key to helping myself. I am an old fart and I chose this addiction for 50 years before I finally chose freedom. I learned a lot of lessons along the way. I hope they can prove useful to others.

Your suggestion of a reciprocal accountability arrangement is interesting. There are several things in my life that I would like to change/improve but I need to consider which of them would truly be in service of Our Lord rather than simply in service of myself. Thanks for sparking this idea!

 

I can relate. I felt like a weakling and a hypocrite for giving into these temptations. Time and time again I tried to quit. Sometimes I had a bit of success, the longest I managed was 180 days and I only managed that once or twice.

When I considered the mistakes I made which led to a fall there were two ever present ones. (1) I relaxed my commitment not to dwell on people or images that fed my temptations and (2) I was complacent about my commitment to daily prayer. Over time, I have come to realize that the second one precipitated the first. Furthermore, I realized that my prayer was always performed while doing something else (ex. walking to the train station or mowing the grass or whatever). I never took the time to quietly and devotedly pray to Our Precious Lord nor did I give Him the time and space to answer me.

The key to beating these temptations is regular, heartfelt, fervent conversations with Our Merciful God. It is God who is responsible for the freedom I have found, I proved over a 50 year period that I was completely incapable of doing it on my own.