Research
We work in the gap between two bodies of knowledge that rarely read each other.
The gap
Christian recovery ministry knows a great deal about sexual addiction. Much of that knowledge was earned the hard way, by pastors, counselors, and ministry leaders sitting across from people in the middle of it, year after year. It is real knowledge. It is also, for the most part, uncited. The frameworks that shape how the church talks about relapse were built from accumulated clinical and pastoral experience rather than from the empirical literature, and they are seldom tested against it.
The academic literature has the opposite problem. Decades of rigorous work exists on relapse prevention, self-monitoring, shame and guilt, implementation intentions, and social support. Very little of it takes religious belief seriously as a variable, and less of it still treats a person’s convictions as anything more than a confound to be controlled for. For someone whose faith is the reason they want to change, that research has been written as though the most important fact about them were noise.
Neither tradition is wrong. Each is missing what the other has.
Our work is to put them in direct conversation: to take the peer-reviewed literature seriously enough to cite it precisely, and to take Scripture seriously enough not to soften it, and then to build resources that answer to both.
How we work
Three commitments shape everything published here.
We name what is not established.
Every paper we publish states plainly which of its claims rest on replicated findings, which rest on a single study, and which are design judgments the evidence does not yet settle. A framework that hides its own gaps is not worth the citation it asks for.
We do not soften Scripture to fit the research, or the research to fit Scripture.
Where the two converge, we say so, and we say it is convergence rather than proof. Where a theological commitment drives a design decision on its own, we name that too rather than dressing it in borrowed empirical authority.
We publish what we find, including the inconvenient parts.
Our current paper argues against a claim that is widely assumed in both traditions: that behavioral decline moves through a fixed sequence of stages. The best available validation evidence does not support it. Saying so complicates our own framework, and we said it anyway.
Working paper
Vigilance, Virtue, and Restoration: Proposing SPIRAL Check, a Self-Reflection Tool for Sexual Addiction Recovery
Larry D. Witzel, September 2026
In progress. A PDF will be posted here when the paper publishes. Citation details are below.
Abstract
Pornography use is widespread, including within Christian communities. Yet compulsive sexual behavior has only recently gained partial clinical recognition, and Christian recovery ministries have historically drawn on pastoral wisdom not always grounded in the empirical literature. This paper synthesizes research across relapse prevention, self-monitoring, implementation intentions, shame and guilt, self-compassion, and spirituality in addiction recovery to propose SPIRAL Check, a Christian self-reflection tool for sexual addiction recovery. Central to the framework is a finding that recurs across independent literatures: individual warning-sign behaviors predict outcomes reliably, while a strict, validated sequence among them does not.
This finding grounds SPIRAL Check’s unweighted, dual-index scoring system, which tracks Risk and Restoration behaviors across seven stages and seven categories without assuming that later-stage behaviors are inherently more severe. The proposed design integrates Scripture, including Matthew 5:28 taken at face value, with an empirically grounded, non-shame-based approach to disclosure, reflection, and behavior change. Specific features, including if-then constructed commitment to change, lapse-day reflection prompts, honesty-based gamification, and a closing scripture screen, are each tied to their supporting research. This paper offers SPIRAL Check as a design proposal grounded in convergent evidence, not as a validated instrument, and closes by identifying the research and features still needed before that validation can occur.
Keywords: sexual addiction, pornography, relapse prevention, Christian recovery, self-monitoring, spirituality, SPIRAL Check
What the paper argues
Three findings do most of the work.
Warning signs count. Their order does not.
Three independent research literatures, studying relapse, marital conflict, and occupational burnout, converge on the same caution: the individual components of a staged decline are measurable and predictive, while the sequence among them is not empirically settled. The best validation study of the warning-sign scale underlying most staged recovery models found that a simple unweighted count of endorsed signs predicted relapse as well as or better than any stage-weighted alternative.
That finding changes how a tool should be built. If later-stage behaviors cannot be assumed more severe than earlier ones, then a scoring system should not weight them as though they were. SPIRAL Check counts every behavior equally within its pool, tracks two separate indices rather than one composite score, and compares a person only against their own history rather than against a population threshold the underlying research does not support extending to this population.
Taking sin seriously and avoiding shame are not opposing commitments.
Naming every stage of decline honestly is theologically grounded. So is responding to that honesty with grace rather than condemnation, and the shame and self-compassion literatures independently support the same design. A tool that leads with shame is not choosing rigor over compassion; on this evidence it is choosing a design that works against its own goal.
“Vigilance without virtue becomes mere behavior management. Virtue without vigilance becomes wishful thinking.”
What the paper does not claim
This is a design proposal, not a validated instrument. The paper says so directly, and so do we.
The tool has not been tested. SPIRAL Check has not been evaluated against user behavior, engagement, or recovery outcomes. Nothing here is an outcome claim.
The item set is informed by the literature, not validated by it. Roughly 18 percent of the behavior items map to a specific named construct in the peer-reviewed literature. Most of the rest sit within a supported research domain without item-level testing.
The thresholds are not population-normed, deliberately. The underlying validation research was conducted on a substance-use population with a substance-use item set. The paper makes no claim that those numbers transfer here, which is why the tool compares a person only to their own trend.
Some supporting citations rest on a single study. The paper identifies which ones and declines to lean on them harder than one study can bear.
One behavior category rests on thinner evidence than the others. Compulsive technology and AI-companion engagement is a young research domain, and those items are offered as forward-looking.
What comes next
The paper closes by naming the research that would be needed to validate what it proposes, and that list is our own agenda rather than a suggestion for someone else.
Outcome validation
Once the tool is deployed, does sustained use track with meaningful change over time, and does a digital self-reflection layer add anything beyond existing peer-support models on its own?
Item-level validation
With real check-in data, do the behavior items cluster the way the seven-category structure assumes, and which items earn promotion to a higher evidentiary tier on their own performance rather than on literature review?
Transferability
The literature this paper draws on is thin on sexual behavior specifically and heavily weighted toward men. Whether the framework functions the same way for women, for sexual minorities, or for adolescents is an open question that deserves its own study rather than an assumption of transfer.
For researchers
We are interested in correspondence from researchers working on compulsive sexual behavior, relapse prevention, or the intersection of religious commitment and behavior change, particularly from anyone positioned to test what we have proposed.
How to cite
Witzel, L. D. (2026). Vigilance, virtue, and restoration: Proposing SPIRAL Check, a self-reflection tool for sexual addiction recovery. Anchor Hold Institute.
Larry D. Witzel: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7192-6191