The Becoming Model of Recovery
The Becoming Model of Recovery is an integrated approach to healing from unwanted sexual behavior, sex addiction, or compulsive sexual behavior, developed at Connections Counseling in Orem, Murray, and online across Utah. It works on three fronts at once: weeding unwanted or problematic behavior, cultivating healthy sexuality through the 12 Dimensions, and becoming someone capable of living a healthier life.
What are the three parts of the Becoming Model?
These are not sequential stages to complete and leave behind — the work moves continually between them.
Weeding
Addressing what needs to change
Weeding focuses directly on the unwanted sexual behaviors, patterns, beliefs, and coping strategies that are interfering with your life. This work follows Patrick Carnes' Task Model — the sequenced recovery tasks used in CSAT treatment — covering triggers, the cycle of behavior, boundaries, and repairing harm.
Cultivating
Developing healthy sexuality
Removing unhealthy patterns creates space for something healthier to grow. The 12 Dimensions of Healthy Sexuality broaden the goal of recovery beyond avoiding a behavior — toward caring for yourself, feeling comfortable in your body, building meaningful relationships, and experiencing intimacy.
Transformation
The Becoming Principles
Weeding and cultivating are not separate processes — each affects the other. As you develop healthier capacities, you become more aware of the patterns interfering with them. As those patterns are addressed, you become more capable of living the life you are trying to build.
In this way, recovery continually moves between weeding what interferes, cultivating what is healthy, and becoming the person capable of living it. The goal is not simply to stop unwanted sexual behavior — it is to develop a healthy sexual self and a meaningful way of living in which the old behavior increasingly loses its place.
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Recovery is not only about stopping — it is about becoming
The Becoming Model rests on a simple idea: recovery is not only about stopping what is unhealthy — it is about becoming capable of living something healthier. Most people who struggle with compulsive sexual behavior have already tried to stop alone, many times. This model gives that effort somewhere to go.
Why stopping the behavior isn't the whole of recovery
Many approaches to recovery emphasize only one side of the problem. Some focus almost entirely on stopping unwanted sexual behavior, which can leave a person better at avoiding something without developing the kind of life they actually want in its place. Others focus on sexual acceptance and health without directly addressing destructive or compulsive patterns, and the behaviors that brought someone to treatment may simply continue.
The Becoming Model holds both together. You do not have to finish one before beginning the other. Addressing what is harming you and cultivating what you want your life to become belong in the same process, and each one makes the other possible.
In our clinical experience, the clients who sustain long-term change do so by shifting toward a positive sexual identity — not by managing the behavior alone. The 12 Dimensions of Healthy Sexuality provide the map for that shift. Rather than asking “how do I stop?”, the work becomes “who do I want to be, and how do I get there?”
“Much like a tree with bad branches — you cannot simply remove the bad branches if the roots of the tree rely on them for its survival. The tree must have enough good branches to strengthen its roots for it to survive any pruning. Recovery works the same way.”
How treatment using this model is structured
CSAT-led individual therapy
One-on-one work with a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist to understand the roots of compulsive behavior, build honesty, and develop a personalized recovery plan.
Group work through the four phases
Confidential group treatment structured around the four Becoming Principles — reducing isolation, building real accountability, and practicing recovery in relationship with others.
Structured recovery tasks
The thirty tasks of the Carnes Task Model, paired with the 12 Dimensions so each phase of the work has a clear focus. A defined path, not open-ended talk therapy.
Partner-aware care
Coordinated betrayal-trauma support for partners, so both people in the relationship can heal — with faith-sensitive options throughout.
See how the four phases run week to week in our sexual addiction and betrayal trauma groups.
The 12 Dimensions of Healthy Sexuality
Originally developed by Patrick Carnes, PhD, and adapted, expanded, and rewritten in part by Kyle M. Reid, LMFT, CSAT-S, the 12 Dimensions framework defines the full landscape of healthy sexuality. Each dimension represents an area of growth — explored in therapy, in group work, and through the four Becoming Principles — so recovery moves toward genuine wholeness rather than simply stopping unwanted behavior.
Nurturing
The ability and willingness to provide care for the self, to accept the need for support, care, and kindness from others, and to provide care for others.
Sensual Awareness
The ability to slow down the mind, opening yourself to all senses, and observe the presence, feelings, and perceptions of the self, others, and the world around you free from judgement.
Self-Image
The ability to feel worthy of being loved by others, that we are more than how we see ourselves, and that we have something to offer others, and they have something to offer us.
Self-Definition
Embracing an authentic self by having a clear knowledge of both your strengths and weaknesses, taking ownership of your life, and clearly expressing needs and boundaries.
Openness
The ability to lean into sexual authenticity, vulnerability, and transparency with others.
Sexual Renewal
The ability to experience joy in both sexuality and life by being grounded in knowledge, wisdom, and personal integrity.
Relationships
The ability to foster authentic, respectful, and non-sexualized relationships — regardless of gender, race, or background — and to repair relationships and familial bonds through patience, growth, and connection.
Partnership
The ability to maintain an interdependent, equal relationship with a partner that strives for both intimacy and oneness.
Non-Genital Intimacy
The ability to achieve physical and emotional intimacy, attunement, and sexual fulfillment without the use of genitals.
Genital Intimacy
The ability to let go of uncertainty, risking ourselves to be seen, and freely experience erotic feelings with the use of the genitals.
Spirituality
The ability to connect sexual desire and expression to the pursuit of spiritual wholeness and meaning in one's life.
Passion
The capacity to express deeply held feelings of desire and meaning about one's sexual self, relationships, and intimacy experience, and actively pursue these passions to contribute meaningfully to society.
The 12 Dimensions of Healthy Sexuality originated with Patrick Carnes, PhD, and have been adapted, expanded, and rewritten in part by Kyle M. Reid, LMFT, CSAT-S, CPTT. © 2025 Dimensions Institute. All rights reserved.
The four Becoming Principles
Four principles describe how weeding and cultivating become lasting change. They also structure the four phases of group treatment.
Much of what drives unwanted sexual behavior is not the behavior itself — it's the resistance to it. Like Newton's Third Law, the harder you push against something, the more forcefully it pushes back. Trying to suppress the behavior is like holding a beach ball underwater: the harder you push it down, the more powerfully it springs back up.
The Becoming Model works differently. Rather than fighting this energy, the goal is to redirect it. By connecting to the underlying needs and drives that power the behavior, many clients find they can begin to separate what they do from who they are — and channel that energy toward healing and purposeful living.
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Vision of Hope
Vision of Hope helps you see honestly where you are and begin envisioning what a healthier life could become. Recovery begins with clarity about who you are capable of being. A living, forward-looking vision pulls you toward change — rather than simply pushing against old patterns.
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Reconciliation
Reconciliation helps you understand and resolve the conflicts, patterns, and experiences that keep pulling you toward the old way of living. Beneath compulsive behavior are often unmet needs and unresolved pain. This principle invites honest examination of what drives the behavior — not to excuse it, but to understand and address it at its roots.
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Commitment
Commitment turns new understanding into action by creating the practices, boundaries, and structures that support change. This is not a single decision but a daily re-commitment — a choice, renewed repeatedly, to orient your life around your values and your vision rather than old patterns.
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Becoming
Becoming is the gradual process of embodying and sustaining these changes until healthy sexuality becomes increasingly part of how you live and who you are. Transformation is iterative — layer by layer, cycle by cycle. Depth of change grows with each pass through these principles, not in a single dramatic moment.
How the principles work together
These four principles form a synergistic, iterative cycle — they build on each other continuously rather than working in a fixed sequence. Many clients find their vision evolves as they grow; conflicts they thought were resolved reappear at a deeper level; commitment is tested and renewed again and again. The cycle doesn't end — and that is the point. You are not working toward a finish line where recovery is done. You are developing a way of living that draws you further from unwanted behaviors and closer to your highest self.
Each principle also applies both broadly (to overall recovery) and narrowly (to each of the 12 Dimensions of Healthy Sexuality) — making them foundational to every stage and every area of your growth.
The Becoming Principles are the clinical work of Kyle M. Reid, LMFT, CSAT-S, CPTT, developed through years of clinical practice at Connections Counseling Services. The 12 Dimensions of Healthy Sexuality originated with Patrick Carnes, PhD, and have been adapted, expanded, and rewritten in part by Kyle. Both are presented in his forthcoming book on healthy sexuality and recovery.
Who this model helps
- People caught in compulsive pornography use or sexual behaviors despite wanting to stop
- Those whose behavior is harming their marriage, family, faith, or work
- Clients who've tried to stop alone and need real structure and accountability
- Anyone who wants to build healthy sexuality, not only avoid unwanted behavior
- People of faith who want recovery that respects their values
- Partners affected by betrayal — we coordinate parallel care for both
Related care at Connections Counseling
The Becoming Model of Recovery guides our sex addiction treatment specifically. It sits alongside the rest of the Connections Counseling service menu, where our clinicians use the approaches suited to each concern — EFT for couples, EMDR for trauma, and others. Many clients in recovery also engage:
Frequently Asked Questions
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