These thirty tasks constitute the work that would be done by participants in an intensive outpatient treatment program that would cost many thousands of dollars and would involve classes over a period of some three or four months, four or five nights a week.  The first seven are the hardest, each one requiring about eight different "performables," which include readings, writings, exercises, and verbal reports of learning.  This "Recovery Zone curriculum" is now available through certified sex addiction therapists like me, less expensively, without leaving home at night, and stretched over a longer period of time in communities like Louisville and Lexington that have no intensive outpatient program for sex addicts available.  Here are the thirty tasks:

1.  Break through denial

2. Understand the nature of addictive illness

3.  Surrender the illusion of control

4.  Limit damage from behavior

5.  Establish sobriety

6.  Ensure physical integrity

7.  Participate in a culture of support

8.  Reduce shame

9.  Grieve losses

10.  Understand multiple addictions and sobriety

11.  Acknowledge cycles of abuse

12.  Bring closure and resolution to addictive shame

13.  Restore financial viability

14.  Restore meaningful work

15.  Create lifestyle balance

16.  Build supportive personal relationships

17.  Establish healthy exercise and nutrition patterns

18.  Restructure relationship with self

19.  Resolve original conflicts and wounds

20.  Restore healthy sexuality

21.  Involve family members in therapy

22.  Alter dysfunctional family relationships

23.  Commit to recovery for each family member

24.  Resolve issues with children

25.  Resolve issues with extended family

26.  Work through differentiation

27.  Recommit/commit to primary relationship

28.  Commit to coupleship

29.  Succeed in primary intimacy

30.  Develop/renew a spiritual life

(Note:  for me, task 30 occurs early and often for those whose faith is active.)