Happy New Year!!!

I (Frank) and everyone at Small Groups Online pray that you’ve had a wonderful start to 2022. I’m really excited for all God has for us in this new year! There will be so much more great content coming on the blog this year and we’re thankful to have the opportunity to encourage you and equip you on your journey.

As this is technically the “last” post for 2021, I wanted to highlight some of my favorite posts from this last year and the lessons contained within them. A lot of words have been written and you have may not caught each month’s post. So we wanted to share what I believe to be the best of the best from 2021. It’s that time of year where everyone shares their “best of the best” content, so I figured, why not do it here too? 🙂

You’ll notice in this post I’ve listed my top 6 favorite posts with the main point of the article and some extra commentary as well. I would encourage you to read all of the articles in full as time allows.

Here are six of my favorite recovery posts from 2021:

1. What Do You Want From Your Recovery In 2021?— I love starting every new year with having a conversation about the importance of vision in a person’s life. Charting out where you want to go in the coming months and most importantly WHO you want to become is so crucial and critical in recovery. So in this post, I asked the question that if there were an area you could get better in or become strengthened in, what would it be? I give four very important areas to look at in recovery. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil them here. But here is the main point: Once you stop learning, you stop growing. It’s so important to never forget that truth. The day I decide to kick back and think to myself that I know all there is to know about my recovery, I’ve harmed myself in a way like none other. Never stop hungering for growth your life, for improvement, and for health. There’s always some way we can get better. Thankfully, you don’t have to do it on your own. Which leads us to the next best recovery lesson from 2021…

2. 4 Vital Sources of Community You Can Find Today — Hopefully you’ve come to this realization by now, but recovery cannot be done alone. In order to find long-term success on your journey, there’s much work to be done! But here’s what you need to know: You are not alone in your recovery. There are so many sources of support and community available to you. But YOU must be the one to want it and find it. In this article, I share four vital sources of community that you can find today. Community is literally one phone call, one email, one message away. It’s not hard to find. Small Groups Online offers incredible opportunities for you to meet with other men and women who share the struggles that you do. I’ve said this many times, but I’ve counted my months and years in a support group to be one of the greatest things I could have done to find freedom and healing.

3. 2 Reasons Why Freedom (Not Sobriety) Should Be Your Goal In Recovery— Sobriety is a very popular term in recovery circles. It’s a popular indicator of the amount of time someone has gone without acting out or expressing compulsive behavior. At the heart of the word there’s nothing inherently wrong, but I believe it’s how it’s been used that has possibly gotten us off track. Experiencing freedom in recovery is the real goal, not just sobriety. If we don’t eventually make it our goal to understand the WHYS behind our behavior, we’ll never truly be free. In this post, I share 2 reasons why freedom should be the goal in recovery, just racking up more days without using porn (or whatever the addiction is).

4. How Do I Talk To My Spouse About Addiction & Recovery?— Quote possibly one of the hardest things to do in recovery is learning how to communicate with your spouse about your addiction (if you’re married). I remember how difficult the conversations were when I was coming out of my addiction because of my history of lying to my fiancé at the time. The first year of our marriage was incredibly challenging because we hadn’t learned how to talk about the things I struggled with. We needed help. And one of the greatest tools someone gave us was an acronym: F.A.N.O.S. You’ll have to read the post to find out what each letter means but believe me when I tell you, FANOS is a really helpful tool to aid you in the conversations between you and your husband or wife. It will help you learn how to talk with your spouse about your addiction without things getting weird, awkward, or combative.

5. BLAST: A Guide To Understanding Your Triggers—  One of the greatest skills you can learn in recovery is being able to understand what your triggers are. Why do you act out the way that you do? B.L.A.S.T. is a guide for beginning to understand some of the most fundamental reasons for why we act out. Unless we understand what kind of feelings and emotions lead us to viewing pornography or masturbating, we’ll repeat the same behavior over and over again. You must become a student of your heart — learning what your heart is craving and and it’s need to be healthy. Very similar to FANOS, use this acronym frequently to try and understand what is really going inside.

6. How Practicing Gratitude Can Change Your Brain Pt.1— The last post I would highly recommend reading is one of the most recent ones on the SGO blog: Learning how cultivating gratitude can literally transform your brain to help you think differently. Before you think I’m crazy, there’s actual science to back this up. Within this article, I share some very interesting findings about the brain, but here’s the point: The very chemicals in your brain that were released through repeated exposures to pornography can also be delivered through simple acts of giving thanks. Practicing gratitude. And it can CHANGE your brain.

I believe this is some of the best content posted on SGO from 2021. There’s so much more you could go back and read, but I hope that you’ll consider taking some of these recovery lessons and implementing them in your life in this new year. You won’t regret it.

You also won’t regret checking out Small Groups Online. SGO offers a very unique and intimate opportunity for community with other men and women who struggle with pornography and other forms of sexually compulsive behaviors. Imagine finding a group of men or women just like yourself who want more than what they’re currently experiencing. They want their lives back. They want hope. They want freedom. Community is one of the greatest ways to find these things so check out Small Groups Online today to get started on your journey!