Hello all,
What I am going to share here is not so much my story, but more a brief rundown of my situation and how I finally found the right help, and hopefully it would help others in similar situation, by showing them that they are not alone, and that there is help out there.
Like many other stories that we see here mine is pretty similar in some ways, but also unique in many other ways,
I was a a chushva bucher in yeshiva, I married well, and I have always been more of the serious, respected yingeleit, and even a mitzlach.
A few years after I got married I started slipping into leading a double life for the lack of a better word, while nothing changed on the outside, before I new it I had a problem with inappropriate stuff on the internet,
But here is where my situation seems to be different then many others here, I would fall into these episodes of being unable to do any or most of my daily functions, it would start by extreme feelings of feeling lost, hopeless helpless, small, anxious, sadness, Etc., I would loose my ability to show up in front of other people, and even think straight, I would experience extreme shame for no particular reason, these feelings would just show up out of the blue and even after a good successful day, and to run away from this unbearable emotional pain I would just get into isolation and try to distract myself with whatever I could put my hands on, let it be computer games, news, reading, sleeping, overeating and of course very often inappropriate internet surfing.
I can write an entire book about my childhood, and what I went through, but that is not what I am trying to accomplish here, I will just add this, now that I am a father with kids K'eh and I think of how much me and my eishes chayil are doing in order provide our kids with a healthy, happy earlicha upbringing like any decent parent would, I can somewhat understand the trauma I went through by not having any of that.
I started seeing a therapist and things have become lot better b"h, while still struggling with episodes here and there. but as I said, I am a doing a lot better now and I hope to be fully in remission really soon I'yh.
One of the many stops of my journey to finding the right help was here on GYE, and while I was truly inspired by all the courageous stories here I realized that my situation is different, I didn't have an addiction problem of inappropriate internet usage, by me it was more of a bi-product between many other issues that I was struggling with, as I explained earlier, if I remember correctly, I am not sure, one of the admins from GYE was the one who encouraged me to reach out to relief,
and that is why I felt compelled to share my journey here, because I am sure that there are other chushiva yingelat who find that they are struggling but their situation is a little more similar to mine.
I would also be happy to answer any question about my journey in private messaging or in public.
