How Using an Accountability App with My Brother Changed My Porn Recovery
Guest post by Mac Dohm, creator of The Porn Free Millennial Substack Publication and host of The Porn Free Millennial Podcast
For most of my life, from the age of 10 until the end of my twenties, quitting porn was a losing battle.
I believed it was something I should be able to conquer on my own. I thought that if I just tried harder, prayed more, or found enough willpower, I could finally leave it behind. I didn’t want anyone to know about the secret life I carried, and the shame already felt heavy enough without inviting another person into it.
So I fought alone.
And I got lost alone.
Every relapse reinforced the same lies, “Maybe next time I’ll figure it out” or even “No, I can’t quit this, this is impossible!”
My relationship with pornography became a cycle of promises without strategy, failure without learning, guilt without repentance, and isolation with confusion.
Everything began to change when I finally stopped trying to recover in secret. Believe it or not, the person I reached out to for help was my own brother.
Table of Contents
- Can a Family Member Be Your Accountability Partner for Porn Addiction?
- A Little Bit About the Pivot Point in My Recovery
- The Darkest Season of My Recovery
- What Our Accountability Check-Ins Actually Look Like
- How Using an Accountability App Strengthened Our Brother Bond
- What I’d Tell Someone Considering Accountability
- Meet Mac Dohm
Can a Family Member Be Your Accountability Partner for Porn Addiction?
From my experience, family members can be phenomenal accountability partners.
But, only if both people are committed to honesty, consistency, and grace.
For me, choosing my little brother as my accountability partner for porn addiction became one of the most transformative decisions of my life with momentous recovery as the byproduct.
A Little Bit About the Pivot Point in My Recovery
My recovery didn’t begin because I finally got tired of pornography. It began because I got caught.
About eight months into my marriage, in May of 2018, my secret life came crashing into the light. I handled the aftermath poorly. Instead of responding to this event with humility and honesty, I reacted from a place of fear, shame, and self-preservation. Looking back, I can see that I was more concerned with protecting myself than repairing the damage I had caused.
It was one of the lowest moments of my life.
But as painful as that season was, it became the turning point.
For the first time, I stopped pretending this was a bad habit I could simply outgrow with age. I began to recognize it for what it had become. Pornography was an addiction that had warped my thinking, damaged my relationships, and left me unable to break free on my own.
That’s when everything began to change.
I started listening to podcasts from people who had actually found freedom (Porn Free Radio & Finding Traction). I returned to church after years away. I joined a men’s Bible study where I found other men willing to be honest about their struggles. I began seeing Christian therapists who specialized in helping men overcome pornography, and I invested in personal coaching to learn from people who were further down the road than I was.
For the first time in my life, I wasn’t trying to fight this battle alone.
My world began to open up and brighten again.
Each conversation, counseling session, Bible study, and coaching call became another brick in the foundation I was rebuilding. Progress wasn’t immediate, but momentum was. I was beginning to believe that freedom wasn’t just possible for other people, it could be possible for me.
But something was still missing.
The Darkest Season of My Recovery
Fast forward to December 2022.
After five years of marriage, my spouse and I made the difficult decision to get a divorce.
Although I had made significant strides in my recovery by that point, and experienced seasons of genuine growth and sobriety, the reality was that healing myself did not automatically heal our marriage.
Years of pornography, dishonesty, and broken trust had carved deep wounds into our relationship. While recovery changed me, it couldn’t erase the pain my choices had caused or restore what had already been lost.
In the months that followed leading up to our official divorce date in March, I began to slide.
The grief of divorce, the uncertainty of starting over, and the loneliness of rebuilding my life left me vulnerable. I struggled to stay sober. I felt lost. Broken into a million pieces. And in the trance of escaping whatever fear I could with the familiar numbness.
After years of making progress, it felt like I was in danger of losing everything I had fought so hard to build.
Then one conversation changed the trajectory of my recovery on February 13th, the day before my late, beloved grandmother was admitted into the hospital, Valentine’s Day.
My mentor and coach, Vern Tompke, host of The Finding Traction Podcast, encouraged me to start approaching recovery smarter and download accountability software.
At first, I wasn’t convinced.
I had accountability through church, Bible study, therapy, and coaching.
Did I really need another layer?
Looking back, I realize the software wasn’t the exact pivot point.
The pivot point was what the software made possible.
Although the first accountability app I downloaded wasn’t Ever Accountable, it started something truly remarkable, a daily connection with my little brother.
The next day, February 14, 2023 after visiting our grandmother, we committed to becoming each other’s accountability partners.
This decision in hindsight was rooted in the love of our family and the realization of what truly matters, as we stood with our loved ones at the hospital.
I had no idea how much that decision would change both of our lives.
What Our Accountability Check-Ins Actually Look Like
One of the biggest misconceptions about accountability is that it’s only necessary after you’ve already relapsed.
That hasn’t been our experience.
For more than three years, my brother and I have checked in with each other almost every single day through voice memos around noon on our iPhones.
We see who sends the memo first and then respond to each other.
Sometimes the total minutes are 15, some days they can be much longer. It just depends on the day and what’s going on and what is needed.
We use a framework we call FASTT.
For more see this article as well as this podcast I did with my little brother explaining the process.
- F — Feelings: What emotions are you carrying today?
- A — Actions: What actions are moving you toward freedom? There are 4 pillars:
- Spiritual Health
- Physical Health
- Relationships/Community
- Passions
- S — Sobriety: Green, Yellow, Red
- Green - Steady
- Yellow - Shaky
- Red - Wreck
- T — Threats: Talking through what is challenging or may potentially challenge our sobriety.
- T — Tools: Actions and perspectives we can employ to combat the said threats.
It sounds simple and that’s exactly why it works.
FASTT gives us a language for conversations most men never have.
Instead of waiting until someone relapses to ask, “What happened?”, we’re asking questions that help prevent the relapse from happening in the first place.
We’ve learned that pornography is rarely the first problem.
Usually it’s stress that goes unspoken.
Loneliness that isn’t addressed.
Resentment that’s left to grow.
Fatigue that’s ignored.
Or a difficult day that never gets processed.
By talking about those things every day, we’re often dealing with the roots before they ever produce the rotten fruit while also planting and watering seeds for actual fruit to grow.
How Using an Accountability App Strengthened Our Brother Bond
We’ve now been using Ever Accountable for nearly two years.
While it’s an excellent porn recovery accountability app, I don’t believe its greatest strength is the software itself.
Its greatest strength is the accountability it creates.
The app doesn’t do the recovery for you.
Connection and community does.
What Ever Accountable does exceptionally well is remove the opportunity to hide.
It creates transparency by giving both of us visibility into our digital lives. We don’t have to rely solely on memory or self-reporting, because there’s a shared level of honesty built into the process.
That changes the conversation.
Accountability works when secrecy is eliminated through vulnerability.
When there’s nothing to hide, there’s far less shame to carry.
When shame loses its grip, honesty becomes easier and sought for.
And when honesty becomes normalized and a part of muscle memory, recovery becomes sustainable.
For us, the software reinforces a commitment we’ve already made to each other.
Every report is another reminder that someone else is in the fight with you, that someone is in your foxhole ready to battle.
The app keeps us connected, but it’s our daily conversations that keep us growing.
Three years later, we’ve celebrated victories together, confessed struggles together, challenged each other, prayed for each other, and reminded one another why freedom is worth fighting for.
Our relationship today is stronger because of those conversations.
This software, and the accountability that comes with it, did not just help with propelling my momentum to break free from porn.
Ultimately, it made me a better older brother.
What I’d Tell Someone Considering Accountability
If you’re wondering how to quit porn with accountability, here’s what I would tell you.
Don’t wait until you’re “doing better” before inviting someone into your story.
Find someone you trust.
That person could be a close friend, a mentor, someone from church, or even a family member.
For me, my little brother became the perfect accountability partner because we were both committed to honesty, consistency, and grace.
The app gave us the structure.
The accountability gave us the transformation.
Looking back, I don’t think the greatest gift of accountability software is that it monitors your devices.
The greatest gift is that it creates opportunities for real conversations.
For most of my life, I believed the path to freedom was trying harder.
Today, I know the path to freedom is walking with others.
My porn-free journey with my brother has taught me that lasting recovery will never be built on willpower alone.
It’s built on honesty.
It’s built on community.
It’s built on accountability.
I think the person God often uses to help change your life is someone who’s been beside you all along.
Keep Fighting the Good Fight. Break Free. Stay Free. Be Free.
Meet Mac Dohm
Mac Dohm is a digital nomad, writer, and podcaster helping other men on the porn recovery journey break free from porn and fulfill their mission in life. As a friend of Ever Accountable, you can find and follow him on Substack at Porn Free Millennial or the Porn Free Millennial Podcast (available on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube). To watch Mac’s discussions with Ever Accountable’s CEO, Tyler Patterson, check out Episode 60 & Episode 46.
