The Good Lives Model

Unfortunately, it took being convicted of possession of child pornography for me to get serious about quitting porn. One of the tools I've used in my treatment is called the Good Lives Model. Although it is developed for the treatment of sex offenders, I believe it is an excellent tool for anyone struggling with sexual control issues, or indeed any control issue.

The basic premise is that there are 10 or 11 primary goods (depending on how you want to divide them) that everybody needs in their life. They are: Peace of Mind, Relationships and Friendships, Community, Creativity, Personal Choice and Independence, Knowledge and Learning, Spirituality, Happiness, Being Good at Play and Work (can be separated into Good at Play and Good at Work), and Living and Surviving.

These primary goods can be met in ways that are good for you or bad for you. For example, we can live off of junk food. We are meeting the good of Living and Surviving, but are not doing it in a healthy manner. Or we can seek a good that is detrimental to another good. For instance, being a control freak is good for Personal Choice and Independence, but not so good for Relationships and Friendships.

Now we may not have the means for meeting some of these goals or be in an environment that makes it easy to meet them. Furthermore, we may be focused on the wrong goals. Only you can determine which goals are more important to you. Perhaps you really value Relationships and Friendships, but spend all your time at work to meet Living and Surviving.

The point of all this is that when we fail to meet the goals we find important, we are unhappy with our lives. We then turn to things like drugs, alcohol, porn, junk food, gambling, sex, etc. in order to try and paper over the hole we find in life. But often times this just makes things worse.

Only by identifying what we are missing and meeting that primary good in a healthy manner can we ever truly rid ourselves of these bad habits. Otherwise, we're just relying on willpower to see us through. And the problem with willpower is that eventually it will fail us and we will fall off the wagon again.

If anyone would like any further information, I'd be happy to share what I know. You can also Google the Good Lives Model and David Prescott, an expert in the field.
- Ozatm