Porn Coach Playbook: 12 Questions to Vet Any Recovery Mentor

Recovery coaching is an unregulated market. There is no required qualification, no governing body, and no barrier to someone with ninety clean days and a website charging you several hundred a month. Some coaches are genuinely excellent. The distribution is wide, and the cost of picking badly isn't just money, it's months.

Ask these twelve on a first call. A good coach will welcome them; being asked how you work is a fair question, and defensiveness about it tells you what you need to know.

The 12 Questions

1. "How many people have you worked with specifically on porn?" Not general life coaching. You want someone who has seen the flatline in other people and won't be surprised by yours.
2. "What's your training?" Coach, counsellor, therapist, or lived experience. All can be valid. What matters is that they say plainly which one, and don't blur the line.
3. "How do you decide when someone needs a therapist instead of you?" The single most revealing question on this list. Anyone who says they can handle everything is either inexperienced or overselling. A good answer names specifics: trauma, active depression, compulsive behaviour with legal consequences.
4. "What's your actual method?" You want a describable approach, not "we'll see what comes up." Vagueness on a paid call is a red flag.
5. "How does this work alongside device blocking?" A coach who dismisses access control is working with one hand tied. A coach who treats a blocker as the whole answer isn't offering much beyond it.
6. "What do you track?" Streak, urge intensity, mood, sleep. Something measurable, so you can tell in six weeks whether this is working.
7. "What happens if I'm about to relapse at 11pm?" Get the honest answer. "You can message and I reply next working day" is legitimate; discovering it during a crisis is not.
8. "What are your boundaries?" Response windows, session length, contact outside sessions. Clear boundaries are a sign of professionalism, not coldness.
9. "What does homework look like?" Ask for a real example. Coaching where nothing happens between sessions is expensive conversation.
10. "What results can you describe?" Anonymised and honest. Be sceptical of high percentages; be reassured by someone willing to say some clients don't succeed.
11. "Do you work with anyone else in my life?" Partner, therapist, GP, with permission. Willingness to coordinate is a good sign.
12. "What does it cost, what's included, and how do I stop?" Get the exit terms before you start. Long lock-in contracts in this field deserve real suspicion.

Red Flags

• Guarantees. Nobody can guarantee an outcome that depends mostly on you. A guarantee is a sales device.
• Shame as a technique. If a call leaves you feeling worse about yourself as a method of motivation, leave. Shame drives relapse; it doesn't prevent it.
• Big claims about brain science. Specific numbers about dopamine receptor recovery times are invented. Confident wrongness about mechanism suggests confident wrongness elsewhere.
• Pressure to decide on the call. Urgency and discounts-if-you-sign-today are sales tactics, not clinical practice.
• No referral boundary. Anyone who won't name a situation they'd refer out is telling you they don't know their limits.
• Their own recovery is the whole qualification. Valuable, but it isn't training. Ask what else there is.

Prepare Before the First Session

Write down, honestly: roughly how long this has been going on, your longest streak and what ended it, when urges typically hit, and what you've already tried. A coach who has this on day one starts weeks ahead of one running discovery for three sessions at your expense.

Do You Actually Need a Coach?

Worth asking, since nobody selling coaching will. If you haven't yet tried removing access, done that consistently for a month, and told one person, do those first. They're free and they resolve a meaningful share of cases on their own.

Coaching earns its cost when you've done the basics and still can't hold it, or when there's something underneath the behaviour that needs someone skilled. If money is tight, a few sessions with a therapist usually beats months of coaching.

Start with the free part: remove access, or take the porn addiction test to see whether this is a habit or something that needs help.