But if you are a person whose sexual behaviors have taken you where you don't want to go time and again then you may find a 90 day period of sexual abstinence to be a serious challenge. Any justification or rationale your brain can throw at you to undermine your resolve is likely to surface at different times. The growth stage. This final stage can last two years or more and is the final step in becoming completely healed from sex addiction. It is during this stage that the study found sex addicts truly began to enjoy life again and felt confident in having strong, healthy sexual relationships. The Need for Lasting Change It s only natural to feel a sense of despair when you see how long it can take to heal from sex addiction. Often, because of mistaken understandings within our family of origin about needs and how to navigate needs within relationship, we have developed a way of being along a continuum. We may have learned to be needless and wantless (self-sufficient), or that your needs don t matter, or we may have learned to be somewhat needy (a passive requiring of others to do for me what perhaps I could sometimes take care of myself learned helplessness). Every betrayed partner is dealt two blows at once when they discover their spouse s sexual behavior. Blow number one is the gut punch of betrayal; a breathtaking breach in trust that changes your relationship in permanent ways. Blow number two is the shocking realization that your partner has been extravagantly and expertly lying and manipulating reality in order to cover up their behaviors. Often times though, this leads to unhealthy judgment, sexual anorexia, and fear. Desperate to "recover right", most sex addicts are guarded about their early sexual choices and behaviors. Sex addicts often drag perfectionism, shame, and self-hatred into their sexual decision making process, which is what drove the addictive behaviors in the first place. So when someone watches pornography, they are consuming a degradation of God s image and degrading God s image in themselves. In contrast, Colossians 3:10 says that Christians have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Living in holiness means we look more like God and we think more like God.