Why Accountability Feels So Charged

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Welcome to the Husband Material Podcast, where we help Christian men outgrow porn. Why? So you can change your brain, heal your heart, and save your relationship. My name is Drew Boa, and I'm here to show you how. Let's go.

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Today we are talking about a controversial topic in the world of porn recovery. Accountability. Is it healing or harmful? Recently, I asked members of the husband material community, when you hear the word accountability, what comes to mind? And I received completely opposite responses. Some had very positive associations with accountability, and some had extremely negative associations. Here are some of the positive associations people had with the word accountability. Honesty with another person, being responsible for one's actions and behavior, taking ownership, stewardship, integrity, transparency, being fully known, vulnerability, letting someone else in. Connection through honesty. Honesty through connection. I'm not doing this alone anymore. Trustworthy men who can listen without judgment, who lead me to want to do better, freely sharing one's journey with its ups and downs, checking in, being connected to a brother who shares his life and his dreams with me as I share mine with him. A safety zone to share, giving someone else authority to ask me questions, being truthful with God, myself, and others. Stopping isolation, removing my masks, stretching me towards love, empowering growth. One man said, Accountability as it's meant to be makes me think of trust, authenticity, love, and encouragement. And at the same time, that man said, a good practice can be hijacked by fear and control. And that is exactly the reason why so many of us have had negative experiences with accountability.

When Accountability Turns Into Shame

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When I asked that question, what comes to mind when you hear the word accountability? Here are some of the negative associations men shared. Punishment. Failure. It makes me feel like a little boy. Shame. Bad experiences with well-meaning church groups. Pointing out what I did wrong, you should have. Someone policing me. Rules and regulations. A false sense of hope. Self-incrimination, distrust, judgment, anxiety. It sparks a fear of condemnation, posturing, fakeness. One man said, Accountability, I've come to hate that word, even though I know it can have positive connotations. Another man said, it reminds me of one-sided check-ins, rubber bands to snap on my wrist, and feeling like I'm bad because I can't change. Being accountable is on the same level of putting my tail between my legs, having to once again share that I relapsed. Accountability, in quotes, has had zero positive outcomes in my recovery journey. This is so heartbreaking. While for some men, accountability sounds like support, structure, and a lifeline, for others, it sounds like shame, purity culture, the porn police, and it ends up feeling more like a prison than the path to freedom. Some of our community members acknowledged more complexity. One of them sees accountability as a coin. He says, on one side of the coin, I see what many men have said safety, freedom, brotherhood, help, and no more self-reliance. On the other side, I see control, shame, fear, covering up, and going back to isolation. Therefore, I think choosing the right person to be accountable to is paramount. And we will come back to that comment later. One man described his experience of accountability as shame, judgment, and disappointment, but with safe brothers, compassion, curiosity, love, and connection. Someone else said real accountability has to be organic and relational. And finally, biblical accountability is rooted in God's love, grace, and gentleness. The goal is restoration, not condemnation or legalism. Clearly, porn accountability can be healing and it can be harmful depending on how it's done. Two porn recovery groups can have the exact same beliefs about who God is and how we should live the Christian life and what it means to be free and have a completely different culture that creates two very different experiences. One is a culture of fear, shame, and control that has wounded so many of us, that has left so many of us with a bad taste in our mouths when we think about that word accountability. And the other is a culture of kindness, curiosity, compassion that releases shame, results in connection, and brings redemption to every part of our stories. And today I'd like to argue that the difference between these two types of groups is not theology, it's not psychology, it's not any position, it's a posture. And without this posture, even the most well-meaning attempts at porn recovery can actually make things worse. I'm

Attunement And The Five Attachment Needs

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talking about the posture of attunement. Attunement is the key to connection, and I believe it is the key to a healthy, healing porn recovery group. If you want to learn more about attunement and how to do it, go down to the link in the description for my episode called Attunement the Key to Connection. What is attunement? It's a fancy word that refers to reading and responding to the real needs of another person, especially their attachment needs. According to clinical psychologists Daniel Brown and David Elliott, the five core attachment needs of every person are as follows Feeling safe and protected in a relationship, feeling seen, heard, known, and understood, feeling comforted, soothed, and reassured, feeling cherished, treasured, and delighted in, feeling supported in becoming one's best self. Attunement is about meeting those attachment needs first and foremost. When these needs are met, we're not only more open and willing to change, we are more able and empowered to change. Think about it. When you feel safe, seen, soothed, cherished, delighted in, and supported, is it easier to outgrow porn? Absolutely. But if you feel the absence of those things, or worse, the opposite of those things with your so-called accountability partners, that is going to sabotage your sexual recovery. On the flip side, if you're trying to help someone else break free from porn and they don't feel these attachment needs with you, your ability to help will be severely limited. Attunement means not giving advice before first checking to make sure if the person is open to it. At Husband Material, we talk about attunement using two words, curiosity and compassion. Curiosity about what this other person is experiencing and what he might need right now. Compassion for what he's going through and meeting him exactly where he is. That's attunement. And when attunement is present, accountability can be incredibly healing. And when attunement is absent, it can be incredibly harmful. Now I've been thinking about how to improve and transform accountability for the past 15 years. I have researched, I have practiced, I have experimented, I have tried all kinds of different ways of talking about it or approaching it to make it as loving and Christ-like and gracious and transformative as possible. And one of the best ideas for how to capture the essence of healthy healing accountability showed up in the Husband Material community just a couple of months ago. Duncan, one of our Husband Material Academy triad leaders, suggested using the language of attunement groups instead of accountability groups. Now, yes, these groups are still accountable to each other, but at a far deeper level, they are attuning to each other. And that's what makes all the difference. Since then, I've been reflecting on the differences between traditional porn accountability groups and the more curious, compassionate approach of the attunement groups we're offering at Husband Material Academy. It's not that attunement groups lack accountability, it's that they do so much more than accountability, going below the surface level of our sexual behavior down to the soul level, because that's where we find deeper healing and lasting transformation. Now, we're not the only ones offering this attunement model, but I think we're talking about it in a way that's really clarifying, and I hope it's helpful for you.

Five Ways Attunement Changes Recovery

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Here are five differences between accountability groups and attunement groups. First, the goal of old school accountability is control, or as Jay Stringer described it, lust management. The goal of attunement groups is connection. As Johan Hari famously stated, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it's connection. It's about loving and being loved, not settling for the scraps of sexually acting out, but satisfying our deepest desires in real life instead of the sexualized symbolic version we get in porn. Here's the second difference. Accountability groups emphasize building strong routines, whereas attunement groups emphasize building strong relationships. Because when we build stronger relationships, we feel safer to be honest. That safety is the foundation of healthy accountability because when it's not there, people lie, people hide. While the safety provided by strong routines can be helpful, it's fragile. And the safety provided by strong relationships is absolutely foundational. If I don't feel safe with another person, I'm probably not going to be as vulnerable. A lot of porn recovery groups unintentionally incentivize secrecy, hiding, lying, minimizing, denying, by implicitly rewarding compliance with the rules. If you want people to be fully honest and fully accountable and completely vulnerable, you need to have the relational safety net of knowing that no matter what, in this space, I will be seen, heard, soothed, loved, and supported. It's not that rules and routines don't matter, it's that relationships matter more. Here's the third difference. Traditional porn accountability groups are focused on behaviors. Attunement groups are focused on the feelings beneath our behaviors. One of my favorite quotes comes from Ashley Werner, a parenting expert, who says, Beneath every behavior is a feeling. Beneath every feeling is a need. When we meet that need rather than focus on the behavior, we begin to deal with the cause, not the symptom. The center of many sexual accountability groups is a weekly report on behavior. Attunement groups don't ignore behavior. Behavior matters, but behavior is just the entry point into a much deeper exploration of what is going on in your heart, in your story, in your brain, in your life. Because putting behavior at the center of the group cultivates comparison. Group members end up feeling self-righteous and superior based on their behavior, or self-condemnation and inferiority based on their behavior. Overly focusing on sexual behavior fuels pride and shame at the same time, just reinforcing the cycle of addiction. In attunement groups, sobriety matters, but it's not the center. Attunement groups are story-centered, cultivating curiosity instead of comparison. In other words, attunement groups are not about performance, they are about presence, being fully present with one another and getting to know each other, getting into another man's world instead of constantly comparing myself to him, being curious about him, being compassionate toward him. Now that is a group that cultivates connection. To summarize what I've just said, traditional accountability groups are sobriety-centered and they cultivate comparison. Attunement groups are story-centered and they cultivate curiosity. In an attunement group, you're not just talking about what happened in your life today or this week. You're talking about how this connects to other parts of your story, to childhood experiences, to your adolescence and your sexual development. Attunement groups go deeper into the desires beneath your arousal, into the stories beneath your sexual acting out, into all of the childhood experiences behind your attractions. That's all part of attuning not just to what's happening for you in the present, but how this is affected by the past. If you've never had a chance to experience a group like this, I hope you do. The fifth and final difference between accountability groups and attunement groups is what repair looks like. Here's what I mean. If there's a group member who has stopped attending meetings, or if there's a group member who has a severe relapse, or if there's a group member who is clearly significantly struggling one day. In a traditional accountability group, how do they deal with that? For the most part, repair feels harsh. Again, the goal is control. The emphasis is on rules, behaviors, sobriety. Rather than in an attunement group, repair feels healing. It's flexible and supportive. If one man in the group needs to take up the entire time, that's okay. Attunement groups will slow down and make sure that each man's needs are being met, even if that does not go along with the tasks and structure and plan for the group. The group is flexible and supportive instead of rigid and disengaged. Rigid means rules are more important than relationships. Disengag means no one's really connecting at a heart level. That is exactly the culture of so many porn accountability groups, and it is exactly the culture of so many of the families that we grew up in. Families where rules were more important than relationships, and there was no heart-level connection. Attunement groups are places where you belong, where you feel like a beloved son. Attunement leads to connection with others, self, and even God. The only downside is that it takes time and training to be able to do it because you have to receive it before you can offer it. As Dan Alender once wisely said, we can only take others as far as we have gone. While there are some wonderful ministries out there doing awesome attunement, I think Husband Material offers something unique with our attunement groups that we call triads, small, intimate cohorts of Christian men supporting each other on the adventure of outgrowing porn one hour per week at a time.

How To Join An Attunement Group

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If you're interested in joining a group like this, where you can receive and offer attunement freely, experiencing the love of Jesus and some of your deepest sexual shame, consider joining Husband Material Academy. The program only opens up once every six months, and this week new attunement groups are starting up. You can join HMA at joinhma.com. And if you're interested in a more professional experience, we also offer Husband Material private groups led by our certified coaches, and you can learn more about those at husbandmaterial.comslash group. All the links are in the show notes. And no matter what your experience with accountability has been, my hope and prayer is that you would experience extravagant attunement, feeling safe and protected in a relationship, feeling seen, heard, known, and understood, feeling comforted, soothed, and reassured, feeling cherished, treasured, and delighted in, feeling supported in becoming your best self. And that is the foundation of true accountability.

Beloved Son Closing Encouragement

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It has changed my life. It is now my mission to offer the same to you. And that is why I will always remind you you are worthy of this. Because you are God's beloved son. In you, he is well pleased.