Sex Addiction Recovery: Escape Plan

In sexual addiction recovery, an Escape Plan involves your own personal plan for breaking your behavior pattern when you begin to feel sexually triggered and you begin contemplating acting out.  Despite you best efforts to work your program of recovery, you find yourself in the midst of sexual obsession, fantasy, and perhaps already doing ritual behaviors toward the acting out. 

Creating Escape Plan

Previously, you tended to deceive yourself into thinking that you could not stop yourself before you went ahead and acted out.  But in reality, this is a symptom of the addictive thinking that ruled your life.

In creating an Escape Plan, you are no longer accepting your former addictive thinking but rather you are taking action to break the old habitual acting-patterns that hurt others and yourself through sexual compulsive behavior.  Your Escape Plan should be designed so that you can read it in the midst of the sexual fantasy or obsession and remind yourself that you have options besides the sexual compulsive behavior.

Escape Plan Components

Some helpful components to an Escape Plan should include:

1. Acknowledgement. It is helpful to pause, to stop, and to acknowledge, “I’m in my cycle.  If I don’t do something to interrupt this cycle I will probably act out.”

2. Think it through. My compulsive patterns are sustained by my irrational thoughts, beliefs, and rationalizations (minimizing, justifying, and rationalizing) that have excused my destructive behavior. Healthy thinking may involve asking myself such questions as, “How might this behavior harm another human being?”, “Is this behavior going to help me or hurt me?”, “How am I going to feel afterwards?”, or “What losses might I suffer if I continue down this path?”

3. Looking inside. What is going on inside of me? What triggered this cycle? What uncomfortable feelings am I trying to avoid?  What am I really needing at this time?

4. Action Steps. This is a list of reliable steps that can help you break out of the behavior chain. These might include: imagining the effects on your potential victim or your family members if you follow through with your acting out, calling a friend in the program, going to an SA 12-step meeting, reading literature on sexual addiction, getting out of the environment you are in, reviewing your first step to remind you of the destruction this behavior can cause, exercising, praying, reading a list of self-affirmations, etc.

5. Action Steps..  A common component to beginning down ones behavior chain is negligence in self-care.  This component of the Escape Plan gives you the opportunity to look at your own needs and decide on one way to truly meet your own needs in place of the pretending to meet your needs that is involved in sexual compulsive behavior.

Examples Of Escape Plan action Steps

5. 1. Pray
   2. Call Someone
   3. Read Sex Addiction Literature
   4. Think it thru
   5. Attend a 12-Step SA Meeting
   6. Picture of wife or kids
   7. 10 things I might lose if I act out
   8. 10 things I am thankful for.

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Kevin Leapley, MA, LPC, CSAT

Sexual Addiction Therapist at Front Range Counseling Center

Kevin Leapley specializes in both marriage counseling and sexual addiction therapy for men. Kevin has received specialized training by Dr. Patrick Carnes and obtained his CSAT (Certified Sexual Addiction Therapist). Kevin has also received extensive training in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and is a certified Emotionally Focused Therapist .

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