It seems to me that the greatest useful change within myself from recovery so far, is the (imperfect) acceptance that "things will be OK in the end, no matter what."
Sounds overly positive/optomistic? Maybe. But accepting that G-d is in charge is the only satisfactory nechama to my body/heart in response to it's searing pain when lust "strikes" and I cannot give in to it. If I use lust, my life is clearly over, so I do not have the freedom to use it. But it still hurts terribly and at times I feel I must use it! I then tell my body/heart that "don't worry, it's gonna be OK, He'll take care of me and make it OK." Before accepting step 2 ("We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity"), I was out in the cold with no answer to this pain. So I almost always acted out. I had to. How can a person suffer so?
Before sobriety, even though I was frum, learned, said the davening, was aware that He is the Adon Olam, and knew the 13 articles of faith basically as well as I do now - it was just no answer for me then, at all. Nu. Apparently I had to be shown that I am truly powerless and come to the inescapable conclusion that I was a dead-man walking - but did not want to die, thank-G-d. I was sure - no, really positive, that there was no way out for me. It seemed clear to me that religion, G-d, and anything else that I had tried till that point, could not save me. I did not join SA with a plan to get better - I just gave up on my lifestyle and had no idea what to do - and no tangible hope of ever getting better. That really hurts if you are already a married man with kids and "a life", with no idea how to adjust to losing all that... I just did not want to die this way. Only then was I ready to start reaching out for Whoever was really in Power, and got better.
Is this a tangent? Sorry if it is, but I think it's important to share, because it explains my motivation for recovery. Until I finally lost - even as I was actively destroying my life, and ruining the lives of my wife and kids, with escalating and disgusting acting out - my paramount interest was: "self-development". Hey, it was my sworn duty (per Gr"a, R' Elimelech, mussar seder in yeshiva, and pretty much everything else in the Torah seems to imply that), though I was not doing a very good job! And it seemed to me that this all-consuming porn and acting-out problem I had was certainly, ultimately, just another area of self-improvement and Hashem's Will for me to "work on". I had a job to do....
In the end, as I hope you see by now, nothing could be further from the truth - in terms of my approach to it. We are not interested in philosophy here, just the business-end of recovery, I hope, so this shouldn't bother anyone.
Hey - my acting out had little to do with what's right/wrong or with philosophy, right? So recovery had to be basically along the same lines, as my life does today. In my case, as long as I was fighting this problem in order to become a better person- or even to do what I saw as Hashem's Will - I was a loser and a dead-man. Apparently, it couldn't be because of faith, "the Torah told me so", or to get a reward (even self-fulfillment). It just had to be to save my life. Totally selfish, "enlightened self-interest".
Perhaps that was how we accepted the Torah. We saw He was really, really, Everything, and said to ourselves: Hey - we will do whatever you say!! No questions asked. We want to be with You!!
Make any sense? That was and is my journey. And I owe it all to lust and schmutz, apparently the agent chosen by Hashem (with some help from me) to get me close to Him.