Hi All,

My name is HelpNeeded as I finally came to a realization that nothing i'm doing (talking to Hashem, talking to myself, reading GYE emails, learning about shmirat habrit) is working to help me stop acting out my desires. It always starts on the internet at nights and ends with me waking up feeling really down because I failed again.

No, I don't have an internet filter yet. I don't really know how to explain it to my wife.

I need help but I don't really know where to turn. I open my heart to Hashem but it seems as though it's time for me to stop praying and just jump into the yam sof. I'm taking the first leap forward and hoping that eventually my yam sof will split open and reveal a dry path of purity from this terrible desire and sin.

May Hashem bless all of you here and all of our brothers and sisters who aren't here to help free us from this terrible avera. I hope to learn and grow from each and every one you on this forum as best as I can.

Hi. Welcome aboard. Coming aboard GYE is always a good step.

Especially when the waters are a little rough. But they're not a yam suf, and surely not anything swimming around in, at all.

You'll surely be getting a more 'official' welcome from the machers on the site, but I happened to be cruising through and saw your entry.  Just wanted to say, welcome aboard matey.

As for falling into the sea, perhaps you could rephrase your intent as falling into Hashem's merciful hands. Because, you see, when we expect Him to catch us wherever WE decide to fall, it's not quite as sublime as when we let Him catch us in the place He's wanting us to be.

The $64,000 question is, where's the map to that place He wants us to be.  I think you just found it, matey.
You'll find the rest of your way, too.

Welcome to the forum HelpNeeded,

HaRav HaGaon Guard will give you the formal introduction tommorrow, dont worry (I mean he's got to sleep some time. Doesnt he??) I was like you I started out wiht no direction. I thought what I was doing was enough and couldnt understand why what I was doing wasnt working. Till I came here. I saw people change. They didnt become Machmir in Shmiras Einayim. They became Machmir in Shmiras Hamiddos. Thats what this is about. Its about the fact that we think we can control everything and whatever doesnt go our way, is a huge disappointment. Restlessness, Irritability, and Discontent. Otherwise known as RID. Those are the main causes of this addiction. When we change our perspectives in life, miracles will start happening. If something doesnt go your way, youre not a failure. Hakol Bidei Shomayim Chutz Miyiras Shomayim. The word "Hakol" is very interesting. This is not a Brisker lumdish. There's no Rubah Kekula here. Its "Hakol" Mamash! When we come to that realization and really make that our mindset, then the rest is left up to Hashem. Youre going to learn to live so long as you stay on here and post away through the good times and the bad times. Thats extremely important. Tell yourself youre going to stick with us. You are worth it. You are not a lost cause and NEVER will be. And by the way, when you said its time to stop davening and just jump inot the Yam Suf, dont do that. Never stop davening. Never. I needed to emphasize that. Davening is all we have. I know you are referring to the Midrash that Hashem tells Moshe to stop davening and just jump into the sea, but I doubt Moshe stopped daveing even when he was going through the Yam Suf. Hashem told him "enough Moshe! Dont just stand here and daven! Go into the sea and daven!"

Hatzlocha Rabba, have a great Shabbos, and an amazing and uplifting Purim.

-Yiddle

P.S Regarding the filter, tell your wife, you dont want this stuff in your house even if nobody has a problem because "hey you never know and it cant hurt to make Gedarim"

Welcome!!

I'm new here myself, This is a great place....

Don't have much to say other than that we are with you and will help you get through this...

May Your Yam Suf Be a great journey....

Welcome aboard, people like me make the forum very complicated, with inside jokes, pranks, and random chizzuk scattered across the whole place. I wrote this for someone else, to serve as somewhat of a sitemap. We have members online at all times of the night, and day, so in case of an emergency, merely post an SOS in the top thread of "breaking free"

Our Y"H for these areas is addictive. The sefer Pri Tzedek brings a zohar chadash in parshas noach to show this, if you are looking for a torah source.  Regular teshuva will not suffice.  We need to turn to Hashem and ask for help, dayly and hourly, in overcoming the YH.

Try starting your own thread in the 'wall of honor' and watch your progress on 'the wall'. You can choose to not have your name listed, if you like, and will still get all the email chizuk that come periodicly. Depending on your circumstances, try evaluating what are you primary triggers, and make a cheshbon hanefesh to decide of there is anything you can do to avoid them.

Read the handbook, GYE attitidude, and the stories on this site, and find the chizzuk to pull you through.  The site attempts to help people at every stage of a YH, even if one is not C"V addicted. So you have found the right place. Read through the 'GYE Handbook' to find what will help you, and what works for you, some of the ideas and strategies may not.

if you are looking for a torah-only approach to this, check the area of the forum entitled 'Battleworms Corner' in addition to the 'Beis Medrash'. There is a daily email on the topic of both addicton, and shmiras einayim (no connection to addiction), so feel free to sign up.

WHat else can I help you with? The bathroom is down the hall to your left. Not that door, the second one. And you need to bush the handle very hard to get it to open.  Feel free to help yourself to the fridge, and make yourself at home 

And if you have a gmail account, and want to buzz anyone from this site, block your following from veiw, to save their anonymity (and your own)

Welcome, Rav HelpNeeded!

Your name is incredibly deep - we all do need a lot of help with this battle, and you've come to a great place to get it - the wonderful people on this forum, these holy warriors, have helped me out more than I imagined would be possible.

I think everyone here can relate to the failing of giving in, despite our huge efforts to fight with sheer willpower, and then feeling miserable about it. You've made a courageous choice by coming here and speaking up!

Take it slow, but I'd recommend explaining more about your situation as you start to feel more comfortable here. I know that for me, that helped a lot. Just talking about my struggles, what happens, why, when - it helped me get a clearer picture of what was going on inside me.

Briut wrote on 26 Feb 2010 02:25:


Briut - I think Reb HelpNeeded is referring to when nachshon walked into the yam suf, and when the water got up to his neck, that was when the water split. And that's a great point - we need to surrender to hashem. Realize that the situation we're in, we can't fight or solve on our own - we're powerless.

I'm sure that we'll all be learning from you!

We're here for you, no matter what!

Dear HelpNeeded,

I am the admin of GuardYourEyes. 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!

Make sure to install a strong filter. It will be almost impossible to break free of this while having all the garbage within a mouse click away. See this page for one good filter option, along with instructions on how to install it best - and give away the password to our "filter Gabai"... See this page for another 20 (or so) filter ideas and information...

If you are afraid that your wife won't understand why you need a filter, listen together with your wife to the following Shiur from Rabbi Yosef Veiner, Agudas Yisrael Flatbush

Here's a transcript of one part:

"Not a week goes by that I don’t have to deal with a Shalom Bayis Problem or a problem in Chinuch Habanim or Banos, or a very fine Bochur who will call me up – or at least what is left of a very fine bochur – calls me up crying, begging for help. There is nobody that can claim that either they’re not affected, or a family member, or a neighbor, or the chaver sitting next to them in shul, or the chavrusah sitting across from them in yeshiva. If you discounted it until now, you’re gonna have to take my word for it when I say that there is no single problem facing the yechidim in klal Yisrael and communities at large, there is no bigger problem than this. There’s a Chov Kadosh to do something now before there’s no semblance of Kedusha left in Klal Yisrael. And I don’t say that lightly. Keep in mind, the people who come to me are so frum and so upset about what’s going on, that they’re willing to talk to their Rav. That means that there are thousands of people who would never even speak to their Rav. I hate to sound pessimistic – but if you have unrestricted internet in the house – internet that is not both filtered and reported, I would say there’s a higher than then 90% chance that people have already been Nichshal in your house. And if it hasn’t happened yet, there’s more than 90% chance it will happen. And if it’s not happening at home, it’s happening in the office."

And Rabbi Abraham J. Twersky, MD said in a recent Shiur (you can listen to it here):

"You have no idea as to what category of people have fallen victim to internet pornography. We would not think that these type of people would be capable of it. Hopefully nobody who’s a Yirei Shamayim is going to go look for that kind of trash and that kind of filth. However, it is perfectly possible that while monkeying around with the internet, you hit a button and there’s a pop-up of a pornography scene. You weren’t looking for it, but it happened. You have exactly 3/10ths of a second to turn it off. And if you avoid it for 4/10ths of a second, you may become addicted. That’s how severe it is. It's one of the most powerful addictions. Day after day after day - I get letters and calls from people who say, "what can I do to save myself?" because they have fallen into the pornography addiction and it has taken them all the way down. It has ruined more marriages than anything, ruined families. It's been terribly destructive."

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!

HI there - how are you doing? Have a great shabbos!