Baruch Hashem, I have a very strong imagination, but "it" is taking advantage of it as well. Thoughts, including hirhurrim, pop into my head at anytime. I can try pushing them away after, but the effort to keep them away is too much to keep up. Does anyone know how to keep such thoughts from popping up int eh first place? Thank you.

Posting in this forum is an excellent start to fixing "pop up" hirhurrim.

As you have probably seen on this forum.  Reading the guard your eyes handbook is the most important start:

www.guardureyes.com/GUE/PDFs/eBooks/GuardYourEyes%20Handbook.pdf

The suggestions there have help me (and others) enormously.

In fact, I feel saying anything here would undermine the tremendous value of the Guard Your Eyes Handbook.

Clearly you are trying and Hashem will grant you success in this area.

looktoshamayim wrote on 27 Jan 2010 22:03:
Dear Reb LTS, before we talk about mussar and stuff can we say shalom aleichem? 
Welcome to our forum!!
I don't know how familiar you are yet with the site, but it's seriously awesome.
Take some time for yourself to look through the site and see all the stories and things all of went through, just to give you a perspective of how what your going through is actually very normal and even expected of you.

Now as far as your shailah...
The Pele Yoetz says, "Anyone who desires to be free of all hirhurim and not have to battle them - this is nothing other than taivoh"!
Do you hear R' LTS? You want the right things, but you don't realize that the ideal situation for you, is to have the thoughts, and fight them, as strange as this sounds. H-shem actually wants you to have these thoughts!!

Now, I'm not denying that dealing with them can be very difficult, even frustrating sometimes. But you can do it! You can train yourself to be instinctively on guard, and as soon as the thought arises - to gently let it go by thinking of something else. Gradually the thoughts will start to decrease on their own - once you start pushing them away consistently.
I don't know what else your dealing with in this area, because you didn't tell us, but if you are struggling - that might have a lot to do with it.
Also, Torah B'iyun helps a lot for purifying machshavos, especially once you have succeeded in blocking up all routes for tumah to enter any further.

Hatzlacha Rabba!!
Hope to see you around here more often - with good news!
(We want to hear about your success too y'know, not just about your problems) 



KG

Hi looktoshamayim,

Please see this page, from top to bottom, for many great tips on how to deal with hirurai aveira.

Dear Looktoshamayim,

Welcome to our community! Once you’ve arrived, there’s no turning back. Everyone here will just grab a hold of you and pull you up, up, up!

Scientific studies have shown that it takes 90 days to change a neural thought pattern that was ingrained in the brain through addictive behaviors. Did you join the 90 day chart on-line? Sign up over here.

We get cries for help every day, by e-mail and on the forum. Tzuras Rabim Chatzi Nechama    And that is why we created the GYE handbooks (links below). If you read them well, from beginning to end, slowly, and try to implement what you read, you will find the answers within them to enable you to completely turn your life around. You’re worth it.

Also, join the daily Chizuk e-mail lists to get fresh chizuk every day, and post away on this forum. You will get tons of daily Chizuk and support. This disease can’t be beat alone. It works best when you get out of isolation!

GuardYourEyes also offers various free anonymous phone conferences, where you can join a group of other frum Yidden, along with an experienced sponsor. See this page for four different options. Our conferences are taking place daily, throughout the week… This would be a tremendous step in the right direction for you and help you learn freedom from this addiction. Not only will you learn the secret of the 12-Steps – which is known to be the world’s most powerful program for beating addiction having helped millions world wide, but joining the group will be another way of GETTING OUT OF ISOLATION and connecting with others who are going through what you are.

Let me tell you a little about the two GuardYourEyes handbooks. They lay down the cornerstone and foundation of our work, and they make our network much more effective and helpful for people.

You see, until now, people would often get "lost" when coming to our website, not knowing what tips and techniques to try. For example, a beginner wouldn’t jump straight into therapy or 12-Step groups, while on the other hand, someone whose addiction was more advanced wouldn’t be helped by the standard tips of "making fences" putting in "filters" etc… So it was essential to develop a handbook which details all the techniques and tools to dealing with this addiction in progressive order. Now with these handbooks, anyone can read through and see what steps they’ve tried already, and if those steps haven’t worked, they can continue on through the handbook where the steps become progressively more powerful and "addiction-oriented".

And the second handbook, called the "Attitude" handbook, can also help anyone, no matter what level of addiction they may have. Often people write in to us saying that had they only known the proper outlook & attitude that we try and share on the GuardYourEyes network when they were younger, they would have never fallen into an addiction in the first place! So we hope that through this handbook, many addictions will be prevented.

The handbooks are PDF files, set up as eBooks, and they have bookmarks and hyper-links in the Index, to make them easy to navigate.

Note: You might want to print them out to read away from the computer. Keep in mind though, that if you do this, you won’t be able to click on the many web links in the articles. But you can always come back to them later. The truth is, it’s anyway good to go through the whole handbook once without clicking on links, just to get an overview of all the tools available. Once you did that, you can start again from tool #1 and read each tool through more carefully, click the links and study each technique and assess whether you have tried it fully yet or not…

Right click on the links below and select "Save Link/Target As" to download the handbooks to your computer.

1) The GuardYourEyes Handbook

This Handbook details 18 suggested tools and techniques, in progressive order, beginning with the most basic and fundamental approaches to dealing with this addiction, and continuing down through increasingly earnest and powerful methods. For the first time, we can gauge our level of addiction and find the appropriate tools for our particular situation. And no matter what level our addiction may have advanced to, we will be able to find the right tools to break free in this handbook!

2) The GuardYourEyes Attitude

The Attitude Handbook details 30 basic principles to help us maintain the proper attitude and perspective on this struggle. Here are some examples: Understanding what we are up against, what it is that Hashem wants from us, how we can use this struggle for tremendous growth, how we can deal with bad thoughts, discovering how to redirect the power of our souls, understanding that every little bit counts, learning how to bounce back up after a fall, and so on and so forth…

May Hashem be with you!

Wow, KG, you are on fire! Wanna borrow my extinguisher..I need to use it often...

Dear Looktoshomayim,

There is an old chassidishe story about a man who asked his rebbe about this (particularly regarding distractions during davening). he told him to go to such-and-such a yid's house that night. The chosid travelled there immediately, got there kind of late at night, knocked on the door, and was ignored. He looked around the house and saw a yid in there! He knocked again and banged a few times....nothing.
Nu. So he sat there and fell asleep for the night. In the morning, the door opens wide and a smiling yid welcomes him into his home, sits him down and gives him something to drink (probably Woodford...).
The guest asks "what's up with last night" (vos iz geshein du, epess)?! and he is told something like this:
"I am the ba'al habos here. It's my home, nobody else's. I decide who I let in and who I don't. Just because you or anybody knocks on the door, does not mean I need to open the door or even check who it is. I don't have to, right?"

Can you hear this? It's not a mussar lesson to me, nor philosophy. It's just a fact.

One caveat: I, an addict, use this method every day. Before recovery it was completely impossible for me to even relate to it. It was basically just another silly (but attractive) sounding idea for me to feel guilty about failing at. In recovery, I learned what I can tolerate and what I cannot tolerate; that I am a precious person who doesn't deserve to suffer with lust thoughts. It took me a long time to accept that I just desrved better. They are just torture, nothing more.
So now I let go of them and Hashem helps dispose of them. I openly and calmly talk to Him about them as humbly as I can; I call any guy who understands my illness and tell him about it in a clear but safe way; I share about it at recovery meetings.
One day at a time, with Hashem's assistance, I'm as free as I want to be.

And I think that "arguing" with them is still kinda letting them in - the yid didn't talk to him, he just ignored him, and went on doing other things. Don't just try to push the thoughts away - think about something else, and let "those" thoughts just sit in the cold.

Welcome, by the way! Hope to hear more from you!

You know yourself best, or the least...according to your mother (at least that's what my moter says). If you are capable of blanking your mind, then do that (few people can). Otherwise try getting pre-occupied with other (kosher) thoughts. This may be bad advice, but the following is one of my first "posts" on this site, even before the advent of this forum! It was my firt attempt at sobriety, and lasted 14 days (my goal was 8 days):

So I has A very hard start...serious withdrawal syndromes...emotionally agonizing torture!!! I would grab the steering wheel as hard as I can, and just fight the urge...until I began enjoying to fight it.....then I welcomed a strong urge, because it make me feel powerful....I am mentally powerful!

Then 2 days later the yetzer hara gave up with the head-on approach, and enticed me so slyly I barely managed to realize that I was thinking inappropriate thoughts.  My new struggle was to realize it......Then 4 days later, and I'm keeping myself very busy al day....it stops. wow it was great. No Yetzer hara. Tisha Beav came and went without me even realizing it till a few days later.

i still have a hard time identifying a thought creeping in, but as soon as I do, that's the end of it.

I think that part of this success is that I used to get a lot of enjoyment out of thinning these thoughts, and no enjoyment fighting it, just the stress and struggle to do so. But now that I can proudly tell me Rebbe about my achievements, and post it on these boards, I get more enjoyments fighting them, it's fun, and exiting.

What got me through the last 2 weeks is a perek from the sefer smirat halashon. The chofetz Chaim tells us that after 120 they will give us a sefer torah and say "READ" and when we get to all the placed in the torah where we transgressed, we won't be able to read it. How can a thief possibly read 'thou shall not steel..' he'll be overcome wit such a pachad and aima...he'll be sentencing himself to gehanom by reading it...because He didn't fulfill it. One can transplant this to any mitzvah. I talked to myself (car-rides are great for that) and verbally played out the entire scenario....'and they're going to give you a sefer torah and make you read "Velo Sasuru....avcharei lav'vachem...ve'acharei eineichem....asher atem ZONIM achareihem!!!" .  
Eventually this became my rally call whenever I needed it. I would just scream it once (in the car again) and all thoughts of looking twice would vanish (sometimes I need to repeat it a second time).
The sefer cheshbon Hanefesh actually advises (as part of it's amazing system) that one write an essay on the middah they want to work on, then summarize that into one pasuk/sentence, then summarize that one powerful sentence into a made-up gibberish word and whenever that person need to conquer that midah he should say his gibberish codeword (no-one will know what he's doing, and verbally stating one's goals help on both a ruchnius and lehavbdil a physiological level*)

All that's great, but my (continuing) experience in SA taught me that I can't do it alone. (Really, I was taught it in all those failing years of torture before recovery, but I was selectively deaf...  :'( )

Thanks for all the advice everyone. Sorry i couldnt reply earlier, Baruch Hashem I haven't been able to go on as much.

I've B"H improved with not focusing on the thoughts, but they now sit in the back of my mind almost contantly. I dont even feel the taivah as much, just the images sitting there. It feels so much more disgusting this way.

Thanks for reading.

Realize that the yetzer hora is making you feel that way - he wants you to feel grimy. So laugh at him, because you know better than that...you're an eved hashem, no matter what, and you're holy. Your job isn't to evict the thoughts - just make it an unwelcome environment for them.

words:    DON'T LEARN NOSHIM (not kiddushin, gittin, yevamos, not nashim!!)


I just had to say this, because you will need some tome in nezikin or something else, befor you are capable of learning the 'graphic' sugyos, and NOT visualize the whole thing.  I had that problem last year, and it took a a few months untill I stopped getting the "pop-ups".

Don't tell this advice to reb Yisroel salanter, OK?  :-*

I actually found learning halachos related to mesechtos in Nashim helpful, I guess it varies form person to person.