About Anchor Hold Institute

Anchor Hold Institute is a Washington nonprofit corporation, organized for charitable, scientific, religious, and educational purposes. We exist to do two things.

The first is to build and maintain digital tools for self-reflection and accountability, along with the educational resources that make them useful. The second is to conduct and publish original research that advances public understanding of how people move toward integrity and stay there.

Our work is grounded in Christian faith and informed by behavioral science. We do not treat those as competing sources. Scripture has been describing self-examination, honesty, and the slow work of restoration for a very long time, and the research literature of the last fifty years has been measuring the same terrain with different instruments. We read both, and we cite both.

Our first tool is SPIRAL Check, a daily check-in for people pursuing sexual integrity. It was built as a personal project, because the tools that existed did not do what its author needed, and then made public because that turned out not to be a personal problem.

We publish original research under the Institute and put it where people can read it.

Our current paper, Vigilance, Virtue, and Restoration: Proposing SPIRAL Check, a Self-Reflection Tool for Sexual Addiction Recovery, lays out the framework behind the tool and situates it in the existing literature: relapse prevention and the abstinence violation effect, warning-sign scales, self-monitoring, implementation intentions, the difference between shame and guilt, self-compassion, and the role of social support.

It also states what is not yet established. The stage sequence the tool is built around has not been validated. Much of the supporting evidence comes from research on substance use, and whether those findings transfer cleanly to sexual behavior is an open question. Some widely used recovery models rest on a thinner evidence base than their popularity suggests. A framework proposal that hides its own gaps is not worth publishing.

We want to be exact about this, because the distinction protects the people who use our work.

Anchor Hold Institute does not provide treatment, and our tools do not diagnose anything. SPIRAL Check is a structured way to pay attention to your own patterns and to be accountable to people you trust. That is genuinely useful, and it is a different thing from professional care. Many people need both. Our tools are built to sit alongside that kind of help, never to stand in for it.

We are also not a crisis service. If you need immediate help, please contact emergency services or a crisis line in your area.

Most of what stops someone from beginning this work is not a lack of tools. It is shame, which is an efficient barrier all by itself, and it does its best work in the moment when help is most needed.

So we design against friction. A check-in you can finish in under a minute. No required fields. Nothing that asks you to explain yourself before you are ready. None of that is generosity on our part; it is the only version of the tool that gets used on the days it exists for.

Our nonprofit structure serves the same end. It means the decisions about what this work becomes are answerable to the mission rather than to a revenue target, and that is the condition under which a tool like this can stay honest.

Two meanings, both intended.

The first is the ordinary one. An anchor holds a vessel steady in water that refuses to hold still. The letter to the Hebrews reaches for exactly that image, calling hope “an anchor for the soul, firm and secure” (Hebrews 6:19).

The second is older and stranger. An anchorhold was a small room built into the wall of a medieval church, where an anchorite lived a life of fixed daily prayer and self-examination. Julian of Norwich wrote Revelations of Divine Love from one. The anchorhold had two windows: one onto the sanctuary, and one onto the street, where anyone could stop and ask for counsel. Set apart, and still reachable.

We think the second window is the part people miss. Self-examination that closes entirely in on itself stops being self-examination and becomes something worse. The old design knew that, and built the window in.

Larry Witzel holds a PhD in Strategic Media from Liberty University, where his dissertation examined parasocial relationships and evangelism, along with a BA in Theology and Mass Media from Walla Walla University and an MBA from the University of Washington Foster School of Business. He is a Seventh-day Adventist lay leader, and he leads Narrow Gate Media LLC and Mission Click, both of which serve churches and ministries.

He built SPIRAL Check on his own time because what he wanted did not exist, then founded Anchor Hold Institute so that the tool and the research behind it could belong to something built to carry them further than one person can.

His personal scholarship is collected at LarryWitzel.com/research, separate from the Institute’s published work.

Anchor Hold Institute is a Washington nonprofit corporation, organized exclusively for charitable, scientific, religious, and educational purposes within the meaning of Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Our application for federal tax-exempt recognition is pending.

The Institute is independent of Narrow Gate Media LLC and Mission Click, the founder’s for-profit businesses. Separate governance, separate infrastructure, separate finances. That separation was a design decision rather than a formality: work meant to serve people in a vulnerable moment should not sit inside a company that needs it to produce revenue.

Board recruitment is in progress. If the work here is close to your own, we would like to hear from you.