I can relate to feeling spiritually dead after long term porn exposure. On the other hand, I can relate to feelings of unbelievable spiritual highs by making progress in overcoming this addiction and remaining clean.

Dov does not like mixing in kedusha and teshuva into recovery, and while I agree with him in principle, it's is also equally difficult to separate them.

We have found that to combat a lust addiction head on just doesn't work.  Eventually (possibly after months of sobriety) after immense pain and struggle our resolve crumbles and we fall, often hard.

What we do find that works is a round about way of fighting. Instead of fighting, we work on changing ourselves of changing our perspective in life.  We acknowledge that lust has us beat. It is more powerful then us.  But it isn't more powerful then Hashem.  He can beat lust.  We learn to trust Hashem to help us. I'm oversimplifying because this takes work, but if you keep on working on this you will see that you can grow your emunah and bitachon and your every day relationship with Hashem to a level you never thought possible.  And on  the side you will find that your battle with lust will ease and maybe it will not be a battle at all.

musicman-

bsha tova for the new child.

thanks for relating to my posts, for a while there i really felt like a deviant being so obsessed at such a young age. at least i know, either we're both deviants or we've established a new normal.

the wife is a whole nother story. she does know that ive seen and occasionally see some bad stuff. but she is in a much worse place then me at this point so it wasnt too difficult to tell her. as a matter of fact she was sort of relieved that there was something wrong with me too. but i still live the same lie because she thinks its 10% of what it really is.

we struggle with different issues but hers did get more serious than mine so maybe you shouldnt get so creeped out were different after all. even if i also have one child with another on the way.

according to our therapist there are more women out there who have a neediness than you think.(for them lust is being looked at, or attended to or wanted, that would be the stronger comparison to mens lust) and then there a minority of them who actually have the same issues as us or the different worse issue of actual infidelity.

definitely right on the marriage thing.

The tefillah thing

im a very simple jew. i have tremendous simple ability to talk to god or even feel the hashgacha pratit in my life.

when i  mess up it translates into a deep embarrassment in my religious performance  that when i daven i feel as if i want to do something good or be something else in order to actually talk to god. and if i feel as if im dirty and not fit to talk to him, i wont.

(now i have to because its part of my job at where i work)

like an employee who wants to finish his overdue sales report before passing the bosses office, so that he can say, "sure i finished it a long time ago btw do you have my check"

the teffilin thing is/was complicated. i didnt get up for shacris  ( because didnt want to pray) so i was late for work and ran out before putting on teffilin and the whole day goes by and i would think, Should i drive twenty minutes to my teffilin or put it on in the office in front of everybody?tefillin is tefillah and how connected am i anyway? so the day would continue and somehow the day would pass because i didnt feel as if i had what to say and i didnt want to pass hashems office. subconsciously  i avoided simple reminders and solutions to just finding the time or situation to put it on but basically because the morning davening was shot so was the rest.

sort of like a chain reaction.

i want to add to what you said, that you put it behind us and now youre happily married.

maybe we dont realize that being happily married was never the issue. we loved each other then and the love and relationship could very easily continue afterward. the damage done is in the spiritual level we feel that we're now on because of that fall.

im sure you, as i feel tremendous guilt and pain over that episode. but the real issue is you both had some lust issues at one point.
you may find that your significant other has the same issue somewhere too. and depending on where she really is now you just might be surprised at how helpful she can be and what it can do for your marriage to be each others partners.

like bards says make your spouse your partner.

but this isnt a shalom bayis forum so maybe we shouldnt do this here.

me3-

with me theres two different deads, one spiritual (in relation to god) and one very simply, deep depression and an actual heartache(i sound crazy) i almost went to the doctor once because i feel such heartache. im actually feeling it now.

i dont really understand dovs remarks about not mixing the two. to me kedusha is embedded into mitzvos and when we do them we're more holy and when we dont we're less holy. so......i dont get it.
even if one's issue is an attitude problem or a perspective problem that just means its part of the mitzva.

also im hearing (reading) alot about this giving the lust to god. sounds very strange to me.
i understand its a psychological science.
1. decide you no longer will live the same way.
2.identify any triggers and eliminate them
3. find new ways of dealing with root issues like stress and depression.
and if your dedicated enough and with the help of outside friends who you relate your issues with and they give you their insights as well.

and tada. after some years of hard introspection and tough choices youre done.

tell me if im wrong

I do not like mixing the two because I do not believe that for an addict (which many here likely are not, but some are) it's irrelevant that it is an aveiro. Of course it is still an aveiro - but that is not the point. The point is that it has become an obsession and an insanity that is supported by a whole structure of false beliefs and messed up thinking.

I need to learn how to stop first. And that may take a year...not to stop - anyone can stop. But to stay stopped one day at a time, to really be free of the obsession - that is the goal.

And that is not Teshuvah at all, as far as I can tell. Teshuvah comes afterward. Maybe it is part - just part - of azivas hacheit. But that's it. The real Teshuvah is a lifelong process for me, as far as I can see. And my program helps me through that, too. But it is way after "sobriety".

So mixing them together is OK from Hashem's perspective, for He sees that recovery is part of our quitting and Teshuvah. But for us, the teshuvah is the result of recovery - but not recovery itself.

Like staying alive as a result of learning how to drive safely. You do not call a driving course a "staying alive course," and you do not learn how to drive thinking all the while, "Oy! I need to prevent myself from getting killed in a car accident!". That would be nuts and create a crazy driver.

Rather, he learns how to drive. And memeilah he does not get killed by driving into an oncoming truck at a red light. Its the fruit of learning how to drive right.

Teshuvah, I believe, is the eventual natural fruit of learning how to be sober. But it is way beyond the scope of mere sobriety, as far as I am concerned.

But the real reason I separate them is practical. Nearly every religious guy (whether Jewish or lh' not!) who I know that has chronic failure in sobriety keeps repeating the same thing to me: I am so ashamed before my G-d and before people, I need to try praying much harder, I am sinning so badly, etc.

And these are the people who when AA tells them to trash the shame and admit they have a disease, respond: "But if I say that then I'll just keep sinning even more!" really they will not, they'll give up and quit...but it is the pride of religious conquest over their weakness that they simply cannot manage to give up, that's all. So they choose to stay ashamed and cannot admit their obsessions to others - for they are so ashamed of their obvious evil. They cannot really sincerely ask their Higher Power for help - for of course they feel they morally do not deserve it. They keep 'sinning' because the intense sweet pleasure of porn and masturbation is the only thing that they are left enjoying - for their G-d and religion obviously is not working for them...they are failures at it, no?

Ther are other opinions, but that is the one I accepted from my sponsor, a chssidishe rov who is a sex addict and visited prostitutes for years until he got sober, be"H, and from others who accept AA as I understand (or misunderstand) it. It's working for them and it's working for me.

Love,

Dov

PS - as far as making my own spouse my partner, that took me a long time, for first I had to stop acting in a way that trashed the relationship. I got the help I really needed to quit one day at a time, and slowly was able to bring her into my recovery - and we are great partners today. But she is not an addict and does not and will never understand. And she knows it. Heck, she will never unsderstand what it is like to be a normal guiy - let alone an addicted guy! We love eachother more than ever, boruch Hashem, and she knows my entire story with every single detail. But that's another story...

alexeliezer-

counterfeit pleasure is a reb noach trademark. its a good thing he has so many talmidim

on that married post youre def right

i tell myself "if i wasted seed that could have made child whats the big deal now that its not relevant"

True, and the same can be said if she's pregnant or on BC.  So we can now see the profound depth of this prohibition.  It's clearly not about wasting seed.  A normal person (know any?) might say it's a way to exercise control.  We addicts know the true danger....

Come to think of it, the Chumash refers to it as "v'shichais artza" perhaps not referring only to the semen, but the man.

alexeliezer wrote on 24 May 2011 17:31:


That's actually an awesome Ha'arah. Answers some questions I've always had on the subject  :D

I just want to jump in as a singleton and say I appreciate the sharing about building shalom bayis within a marriage.

I was in a very unhealthy relationship with a frum girl. I went in thinking we wouldn't break negia or yichud, but loopholes escalated into all-out rebellion, and a lot of important boundaries fell. I remember we were once sitting together with a group of frum students at our university watching an episode of the Israeli comedy TV show Srugim. A frum boy had broken negia with a frum girl, and then had decided that they should get married as a takanah. It was a joke, of course, and the whole room burst out laughing. But we didn't, because we were both feeling that, and we knew it. We never talked about it.

She's now engaged and will be marrying be"h in about a month. I'm hurting that she's found with someone else what I wanted with her, and it's making think almost non-stop about dating, finding the "right one", revealing my addiction and maybe history of acting out, and finding a woman who can be -- as Dov said -- a non-addict partner in my recovery. I have a lot of fear about never marrying or marrying the wrong person, but everyone's sharing here really helps me to shed some of that anxiety so that I can surrender the fear to Hashem and remember that he's the Real Shadchan, and that maybe I have other things to worry about right now, anyway.

Thanks for sharing. It's just great to know that shalom bayis is something that -- like recovery -- I can study, learn, practice and live.

IamAdam, sounds like you have good intentions, but PLEASE don't jump into a rebound relationship, in which you'll find someone who you think has all the perfect qualities, but really is just a superficial representation of what you think you lost. In other words, don't date to find someone to replace your previous relationship. That is doomed to failure. I don't mean to make this a dating thread, but you sounded like you needed a warning :p

Thanks for the warning! I'm focusing on me and Hashem right now, but could definitely use all the reminders I can get.

Wannabehappy,
Thanks so much for sharing your story.  In my introductory post here, I stated that my addiction started around puberty.  You helped me realize that it started much earlier.  I too was infatuated with the female form (and if no female handy, a male would do) for as long as I can remember.  My earliest childhood memories are of games played with the girls in my life that involved removing clothes.  I always thought this was normal childhood curiosity, but now I know that it became much more.  I had girlfriends (with feelings for them) from first grade on and spent as much time as possible with girls.  I devised various schemes to get the other kids around me to show me their stuff.  (I was occasionally abused physically -- B"H not sexually -- and was neglected emotionally.) Had my first serious girlfriend at age 16, a nonreligious girl (and she was a good girlfriend).

So I wonder, how is it that from such early childhood we can get so set on this path?  Was it just lack of parental supervision and involvement?  Sometimes I think I am a gilgul of some serial sex-offender, and until I came across this website, was failing my tikun.  Either way, the story is cruising to a happy ending.  I'm happily married with a house full of children and clean over 2 years, which just demonstrates that Hashem can do ANYTHING!  I find much more joy in learning and davening, and in permitted, more subtle pleasures.  Which probably means that I'm no longer spiritually dead.  (Now if I could just tone things down in the bedroom, my final frontier....)

Its strange, i have all this new knowledge and my awareness is much stronger but i am hitting bottom again. I had a really stressful couple of days and i was toast. i didnt even feel badly. just completely gave up. where do i go from here????
im falling apart again....

Are you doing anything besides just posting on this forum? Many people really feel that posting on this forum - or actually doing anything at all for recovery - should be enough to fix them, even though they practiced using lusting and masturbating for years and years and it is tied into hormones and natural survival instincts and conditioning, and has a YH behind it, and we are peabrains all of us, really...we have no chance at all on our own. Yet we throw teven at it and then sincerely say "Why G-d, why is it not working?!"

Puleeez.

So what work can you do now? You may not get clean for a year. Ok, but if you get started on the right work now, you may get clean in a year and have 80 more years to stay clean and enhoy and unobstructed life of nice living with hashem. Not a bad deal?

So what work are you doing, chaver?

um

i was on the chart, got a good (for me) 7 day streak. things got tough and like you said im hardwired that way. as soon as stress moved in i was toast.

also when i have time to plan i know how to avoid lust but when it gets hectic i lose focus.

i work 90 hour weeks. weekends are brutal.

i try to take everyday as it comes...

what do you have in mind?

All I can speak from is my own recovery. I cannot tell you what's right for you. But if you are anything like me, then I'd say the following:

If you are an addict, avoiding lust is a far cry from 'recovery'. Sure, it's important, but by itself, it changes little to the better. If you believe that you really are an addict, and really want to change, then you may first need to discover that you cannot. That'd be the first step. Kindergarten.

If you still think you can change by your own power through your truly sincere efforts, then you are not yet near the first step, I believe.

If your behavior and history prove to you that you are indeed messed up in the head, and you feel that you want G-d to give you your mental health back, then you may be at the second step.

In my experience these steps cannot be done by yourself, through thinking a lot. They happen best by talking with another addict/addicts, and with a bunch of writing. Writing is key, cuz the truth doesn't really come out for most of us via speech. Our dibbur is still in golus. Writing brings it out, and then sharing it openly with another person brings the message home by getting us past our self-centered and immature shame. It opens up the treasure of willingness we have inside us that has been locked up all these years. Often, we find that hiding and acting out our precious porn and masturbation is just no fun any more once we have started to really open up to others about the truth about ourselves...especially if the people are real - in person, rather than just virtual (as in a forum). We may continue acting out our lust...but something subtle has changed.

That's step 2.

Have you ever done anything like that yet? I fear that simply posting and being on the 90 day chart and stuff like that are just a band-aid, not a medicine. We - if we are truly addicts - need medicine, and if it is comfortable, it can't possibly be the right medicine. We are talking about changing, here. Try crossing your arms the other way than you usually do for 2 minutes - it feels uncomfortable. Try drying yourself off after a shower in the opposite sequence than you are accustomed to next time - they feel weird, hard to get used to. That's gotta be what early recovery feels like, or else it must be something else, entirely.

No wonder it's not that popular!
The