Jack, you're right on target.  The root cause is emotional, lack of feeling (ANY feeling) and lack of connection to the real world.  You wrote the answer:




The way to do this is to be aware.  Take your emotional pulse all day long.  Try to do it as often as you can, sometimes every minute.  Be aware of how you feel, where you are, what you're doing.  Imagine, if you do this, never again will a Tefillah pass without Kavana.  You're in shul, you're davening to the creator of the world!  When you're on the street, how do you feel?  Are you content or is there some vague uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach?  Why is it there?  Does it make sense?  Are you doing anything wrong?  Are you alive, healthy, doing what you should be doing?  If you think about this and the answers are yes there's an uneasy feeling there BUT I'm alive and healthy, doing nothing wrong and in fact going about a perfectly normal daily existence then you realize that the feeling is unwarranted.  In fact, you have every reason to be happy!  That simple awareness MAKES IT SO!  Suddenly you're happy and content, for that minute at least.  Do it again and again.  Live in the moment.  Hold your head up high, you have nothing to hide.  You can talk to people about what's REALLY going on, because what's really going on is NORMAL LIFE.

One tiny example that I've noticed after working on this.  My wife wants to know when to expect me home after work.  It's a perfectly reasonable question but used to make me freeze up for no reason.  I'd get irritated by this until it became a joke (luckily my wife took it this way) - oh no, she asked me when I'm coming home!!  Ahhhhhh!!!  When I did answer, I often felt the need to exaggerate, just a little, about how soon I would be leaving or, if I'd already left, how soon I'd be home.  Needless to say, I always fell short!  Sure, if there was zero traffic and if everything worked to perfection, I could make it.  But that's very unlikely.  So I'd always come home later than my self imposed deadline, understandably all stressed out.  WHY DO THIS???  The question is perfectly reasonable, my wife is very reasonable, there was no deadline except in my head and no reason for stress.  I WAS DOING NOTHING WRONG and letting no one down by being 100% honest.  As soon as I was aware of this, the problem went away (mostly - I'm still working on it).  Awareness, honesty, openness...these are important keys to emotional health.

Jack, that's a great post. Did you see the dicussion about multiple addictions in "break free"?




I'm mighty curious. Does anyone here have any information on this. Like what percentage of 12 year olds will devour it, what percentage will peek at it and what percentage will throw it away right away?

E-mail #76 on this page is one example of him throwing it away, while this story is an opposite example... It could be it has something to do with the message the parents give over. In e-mail #76 - the father showed his children how careful we need to be.

dear battleworn, yes, I saw that - that's why i posted this long piece - because of that discussion on multiple addictions. Why do you think therapy or group therapy work? It is because these challenges are so common among addicts. Just like doctors can treat the same symptoms in different people, group support can work also for all who suffer. There is a unity. If there weren't similarities among people, we'd need 6 billion doctors - one for each person in the world. So a broken leg can be treated in the same way for a person in Africa as for a person in Oshkosh Wisconsin. And group support will work for an addict in Jerusalem as well as an addict in Memphis Tennessee. But there is a great distance between knowing and doing - our job is to bridge that gap - a difficult task indeed.
One more thing (for now) - i could not have budged an inch in this battle without the support of the people on this forum. One of the first things I noticed when i discovered this site 9 months ago was that everyone here was trying everything in the book - all to no avail. Everyone was a talmid chochom - it didn't help. I said to myself - what's going on here? Nothing, but nothing seems to work! And then I joined the phone group - and that did it! And for the next 90 days I underwent torture to break free, but I had the (anonymous) support of all the people on this forum. Without them, I would not have been able to get anywhere - without a doubt. I will never, ever, forget what guard and all the people here did for me.

Rabeinu, email #76 is of course a beautiful story. But there were at least two more factors in play. The main factor is that his father was careful with his own eyes, and he made his children aware of that. So there's a great shmira from shomayim, and that totaly changes the whole picture. The second factor is that he wasn't alone.

But the child was alone - the father had gone downstairs... But I guess he was in the vicinity

Wasn't his sister also there with him? And wasn't there at least a reasonable chance that she would tell the father?  

Perhaps, but anyway back to the interesting question, what makes kids that age SO CURIOUS about these things, that even having never seen it before, they would DEVOUR it? I guess it must be human nature... Question is, are all kids the same, or are some predisposed to this more? And if yes, why?

These are some GOOD questions.

We can't do any testing obviously, but perhaps on-line we can find some articles written by goyim about this... (But don't do any searching that could lead to bad links now )

Jack says that all 12 year olds are emotionaly weak. (Personally I would assume that there are a very few exceptions and I imagine that Jack agrees) What do you say about that?

When I said weak, I meant not fully emotionally developed and still open to forces outside of them that will shape their thinking and actions. That's why it is SO important for them to have the right environment at that impressionable age. After they are already developed, and the right ideas have made their way into their consciousness, they are not so impressionable anymore, and (hopefully) they will be on the right derech, and STAY on the right derech. Of course, a person can always stray, but if at that tender age, the child was shown the right way, and that way got implanted into his brain, it's unlikely (but not impossible) that he'll stray. So in my opinion, yochanan kohen gadol must have had something from his youth that finally go to to him at an old age. Acher also. I don't believe all of a sudden out of nowhere, they went off.

Jack you're 100% right, the gemoroh says that the problem was really there from before.

Yes Jack, nail on the head! The gemara says about Acher that the problem stemmed from his BRIS MILA! That really goes back into his past, doesn't it ;-)

Battleworn, does the gemara say anything about R'Yochanan that caused it?

I'll go even one more - that if Hashem causes a baby to born with with some sort of deficiency, and we ALL are born with SOMETHING missing - only G-d is perfect, but i mean something that makes the child less in some way than someone else. For example, with crossed eyes, or poor motor function - these can make the person feel bad about himself without anyone else doing anything to him. This low self esteem can lead to addictions also. Any low self-esteem is no good. But, again, it is up to the parents (or primary care-givers) to handle this in the right way, and help this child understand, and not feel bad. I've seen a child in a wheel chair who is very happy - the parents must have worked very hard. Can you imagine if the parents would have felt bad that their child was like that, and not able to help the child overcome feelings of being less than everybody else? Or if the parents yelled at their cross-eyed child every time he knocked over a glass on the table? What would this have done to the child's self esteem? And the child, feeling bad, would have to fill that void - to make up for the low feelings. And what would he fill it with? I'll give you one guess.
And what about the friends? Youngsters can be mean - and hurtful. So there are a lot of ways to fill the void and take away - remove - those feelings of sadness. Like drugs, alcohol, porn, food. Unfortunately, mitzvos and learning are not the things that can remove these types of feelings of sadness. What happens when we grow up without the proper feelings of self esteem? We need all the anonymous meetings - and for the first time a person can feel that they are in a safe environment, and begin to recover. And we are OBLIGATED to seek treatment, for us and all our loved ones, and for Hashem also. Because He wants us to be happy.

I agree with you Jack.  And it's unfortunate that children cannot do anything to help themselves in this regard and that even Torah (by itself) may not work.  However I think Hashem gave us maturity as a means to eventually find and apply the solutions on our own.  I believe that people CAN overcome problems and difficult childhood experiences by working on themselves when they're more mature later in life.  It's difficult, but doable.  And once healing begins, true, meaningful access to Hashem and the Kedusha of Torah is possible for ALL of us.

I agree with EVERYTHING you said. The groups is how we heal, so we can be able to do Hashem's mitzvos, the way they were meant to be done.