The Secret to Healthy Accountability

“So how has your week been?”

It wasn’t the question that didn’t sit well. Everyone asks it, almost without thinking. It was the fact that he had asked me about my week before sharing about his.

And he wasn’t just asking about my week. He meant, how have I done morally.

Accountability can almost sound like a swear word. Hardly anyone I know gets a good taste in their mouth when thinking of accountability.

Businesses want more accountability from their executives. Professional sports leagues want more accountability from the individual franchises. US citizens want more accountability from the government. Everyone wants others to give account because they feel they are being cheated on.

But none of us feel overly safe when asked to give account ourselves.

In fact, in the conversation above, I had just sat down. We were a group of roughly six guys going around and sharing how we were doing in our private lives. We had each been handed a sheet of paper with a list of questions on it, and we were supposed to go around taking turns answering them all. The guy leading the meeting decided to open with the general question, “How has your week been?”

Several of the guys I had just met. A couple others, I had a few months of history with.

On one hand, I felt excited to get to know these brothers on a deeper level. I wanted to walk in integrity and sexual freedom, so I was glad to connect with men who wanted to do the same.

On the other hand, I felt smack in the middle of a mess. How would these guys receive what I shared? I didn’t feel ready to just blurt out “how my week has been.”

So I didn’t.

As it turned out, I was glad I didn’t. Apparently, everyone else had really good weeks. Or we all felt too uncomfortable to share about how we were really doing.

The closest thing we got to being vulnerable with each other was when an older guy across the circle from where I sat shared about what he went through in his youth. That was in the past and he praised Jesus for the new victory he had sensed.

I thought about sharing a time in my life when I experienced victory as well, but then I remembered what I had done a couple nights before. I felt small, like a failure, and as if I would have been the only one struggling if I spoke up and told the whole story to everyone that day.

So, I generalized it all. I talked about facing a lot of temptations and struggling in my thought life. But it was a nice stainless-steel casing over my rotten, deadly mess.

I met with the group a couple more times, but eventually didn’t see the point. It didn’t help. Accountability didn’t seem to work. So I quit.

The problem with most accountability is that we take it from others.

We want them to give account to us. And because this is the norm, we automatically assume others are going to take the same from us.

However, when someone actually asks us to give account, we feel put on the spot. We don’t necessarily feel safe. So, we clothe whatever issue we’re giving account for in nice packaging, stiff-arming the sense of transparency that may be bubbling just underneath surface begging for recognition.

We want to lay it all on the table.

We want to walk through life being able to look people in the eyes and having nothing to hide.

But even more than a clear conscience and sense of release, we want to know we are accepted and that we belong.

As long as we view accountability as something to take from others or have taken from us, we will find it actually fosters whatever struggle we’re dealing with. It further isolates us from other brothers and sisters, and the isolations compounds the loneliness that usually drives us to give in to the said struggle.

In this instance, sexual purity.

Accountability is not something to be taken. Accountability is something to be given.

The secret to healthy accountability is to develop relationships where you can voluntarily share about the struggles you are facing and know you are still accepted and have a place where you belong.

Only when it is flipped on its head, when I am telling you how my week went before you even get a chance to ask—only then, will accountability meetings nurture any progress in one’s private life.

If we’re doing things secretly in private, we can lie about in public. There isn’t any personal conviction strong enough to deter one’s inner justifications of things no one else knows anything about.

But if we stop doing it secretly, if we start pulling others into that part of our story without them demanding it of us, the bondage is almost immediately broken.

I remember a conversation once with my dad where I was frustrated people didn’t follow through on accountability. No one checked in with me, and I had been having a rough week. That’s when he told me about giving account versus expecting people to come take it.

When I was eighteen years old, my family moved to Southern California and we hadn’t made many new friends, yet. I certainly hadn’t gotten to know many other guys my age.

Yet, here I was. Eighteen years old with all the hormones and desires of every other eighteen-year-old.

I knew I needed something, so I developed an email group where I would send biweekly reports of how I was doing in my sexual life. Eventually, I broadened to other goals as well, but the thing that has always stood out in my mind was that my simple decision to give account—the raw account—almost immediately dissolved any urging to lust.

As I discovered, I was still human and still full of hormones. There were times I gave in to masturbation. There were times I looked at inappropriate images. But with each failure, as I chose to give the account myself, being honest about what I had done, I found not a deflating sense of victory, but an increasing sense of strength.

Secrecy had lost its hold. What I did behind doors no longer had mystery. And that gave me freedom.

The email list lasted for a few years, but I’ve taken the same principle into small groups, one-on-one relationships, other brothers in our church, and I’ve found it’s true the world around. When I give account and don’t expect or wait for others to ask it of me, I experience far more freedom.

I also discovered, that if I am willing to give before it’s asked of me, others are much more willing to give account for themselves. As we share voluntarily about how we’re doing, healthier relationships can be formed and those relationships become powerful elements to a life of wholeness.

One of the challenges we face today is the use of personal, digital devices.

I can get into all kinds of things while working on my computer in my office that other men never find out about. I can get into things no one else in my own home would have to find out about.

We can delete internet history.

We can tell stories.

There’s a lot we can hide behind the closing of a laptop.

But that kind of hiding doesn’t bring inner peace. It doesn’t free one to be able to look others in the eyes without having anything to hide.

However, the possibility of hiding and the plethora of things to see online can be a strong temptation—especially when one is struggling to walk in freedom.

One of the tools I highly recommend in helping me give account is Covenant Eyes.

Covenant Eyes is an accountability software you can download and use across all your devices. You select a group of people you want to give account to, enter their email addresses, and then they are sent biweekly reports of all your activity online.

There are three primary reasons I love Covenant Eyes and why I partner with them in getting their software out to the world. First of all, they provide automated reports. You don’t choose each day whether you’re going to give account. You choose once, and then it automatically tracks and sends the reports.

There have been times I was tempted to click on a link—and even had a good justification for it—but chose not because I realized it would be sent to my accountability partners. Knowing it would go to them helped me process what I was really going after.

And that’s what makes this kind of accountability powerful.

There’s no secret in the act of giving account other then it forces one to intentionally think through what he’s doing. In other words, it forces us to take personal responsibility for our failure and our victory.

Another reason I recommend Covenant Eyes is that a year ago they came out with Screen Accountability. This means that it not only tracks the websites you go to, but the very images you see on screen as well. Screen Accountability was the missing element in the age of apps that aren’t browser based. If a particular screen is flagged, whether in an internet browser or on a mobile app, it sends a blurred version of the screen to your partners and they’ll see just what was being viewed.

This helps us be transparent about what we’re looking at. With Screen Accountability, we can’t as easily explain away why we clicked on a certain website. And this keeps us honest about how we’re really doing.

The final thing I like about Covenant Eyes is that it’s easily affordable for the sake of sexual wholeness—especially when you consider the cost of sexual brokenness.

Prices vary from $11.99/month to $14.99/month depending on the particular package you choose.

There is no formula for sexual wholeness. We are all on a continuum of health or unhealth. At different periods of our lives we find ourselves healthier than at other periods of life.

Accountability done well helps us walk in health. Accountability not done well, can accentuate our unhealth.

The secret to healthy accountability is to give account instead of making others take it from you.

And don’t just give verbal account. Since we live in a digital age, let’s give digital account as well.

If you’re ready to get started on Covenant Eyes for yourself, click here and you’ll be redirected to their website. If you need help understanding how to download Covenant Eyes and install it, you can check out a tutorial article I put together, here.

Question: Do you think of accountability as being something you give instead of take? Have you found that paradigm shift to be helpful in finding freedom from harmful habits? You can share your thoughts in the comments below.