Thank you for the kind words wishing you hatzlacha in your own journey as well

I'd like to share a suggestion with the chevra here, just something I noticed to be very helpful in my own life. For many of us, P&M is likely one of several ways that we shield ourselves from having to emotionally regulate. Others might be binge watching TV, eating lots of sugar, using social media etc. For me a big one was drinking alcohol. My suggestion is to try to identify the 3-4 primary things you do to hide away when the going gets tough and to give up or at least heavily minimize one of them (other than P&M). I'm referring to the kinds of activities that cause you to think "as long as I continue doing X, I will not be my true self." The rationale is that, your emotional coping skills are essentially a muscle. If that muscle never gets worked out, then it just atrophies. We all know on here that the pull to P&M is extremely visceral and getting free of it is quite difficult on that account. But, not all of your coping mechanisms will have such a visceral pull. I don't think we all get pulled to read that next silly news article in the same way that we do to watch pornography. A less visceral coping mechanism is much easier to scale down and, crucially, will finally get some oxygen flowing to your emotional regulation muscles. I think it's really key to peel back one of those layers of coping and expose your mind to the arena of challenge. Once you start getting that training back, the fight or flight instinct in the face of stresses and anxieties goes way down. For me, since I stopped drinking, I BH just have not entered the catastrophizing mindset I regularly found myself in that would compel to watch pornography. I hope this idea helps some

Just some miscellaneous reflections to share here. I and I'm sure many others have been experiencing stress related to work/parnasah during the yomim narayim. There's a certain feeling of insecurity and anxiety that comes from asking for so many days off work, falling behind in different areas, and the steep transitions back and forth between kodesh and chol during these days. Today was a day where my mind really started to run as more sources of stress kept getting heaped onto the pile. Then a thought occured to me that really helped me reset. I think it is by design that the busiest time in the Jewish calendar coincides with one of the busiest times in the secular world. I know many people who just started new jobs, or new semesters, or their business is waking back up from a summer down period. At exactly that moment, Hashem asks us not to get sucked into all that is happening around us, and to entrench ourselves in a relationship with Him. This is no simple task, and when I look at myself in my normal way of thinking, I have to say that I am really not at a madrega to move through these very demanding period with calmness and bitachon. But, the thing is that I (and we) specifically should not look at ourselves in our conventional way during this period. We just went through Yom Kippur. Hashem totally cleaned us of our mistakes, and we have an unbelievable closeness and totally new relationship with Him having gone through that day. These means that we are not bound by our ordinary limited thoughts which kept us distant and perhaps lacking in bitachon. The doors are wide open for us to rely on Hashem, and for him to steward us through these coming days with total closeness. If we stay stuck in our previous way of thinking about ourselves and don't process the transition we went through we will miss the opportunity to experience this new relationship. I think that is why Hashem gives us such a challenge during this period. It is a chance to ascend and, given our clean slate, it is really an unbelievable opportunity. While I do not expect perfection of myself, my focus and intent for these coming days is to just show up each day and do what I can, but to refuse to drown in concern. Hashem is with me and all of us more than He ever has been before.

Been procrastinating updating my counter here but feeling strong enough today to address things. Had a really really hard past two weeks. Made very good strides over the past few months with anxiety and mental health as well as physical health. I'm grateful for the yomim tovim we have, but they threw quite a wrench in my routine and I could not find my footing for a while. Clean since this past Friday. I'm reminded that growth is iterative. As much as I'd like to ride off into the sunset and never make a mistake again, that is not the nature of my trajectory.

Getting back on the healing train, it's been an interesting time. It has felt like a whole bunch of doors closed on me the past few weeks and that I have been cut off in a weird way from my own emotions and totally sapped of motivation both in spirituality and career. This week I had some things go wrong at work that would have ordinarily caused a huge emotional psychological wobble for me, but I didn't react at all to them. It's a bit of a strange feeling as on the one hand I suspect the lack of reaction is partially rooted in apathy/disengaging, but on the other hand I think there is an honest part of me that just cannot keep abusing myself with stress and anxiety and is no longer will to "freak out" over these kinds of things and I'm enjoying this newfound stability. I also cannot bring myself to care about the days counter. I'm basically glad that today I am not masturbating and don't have to experience the huge depression that it brings on. Last night I was thinking back to a really really low day that occurred about two weeks ago where I was so unbelievably anxious that it felt like everything was over. I even caved on my no alcohol policy, drank a bunch, looked at bad photos, the whole nine yards. I realized I can't even remember at all what I was so worked up about. Made me realize that I psychologically can be pretty sensitive but that it is not always grounded in reality.

With all that being said, I do think I'm doing better and am trying to reopen those closed doors. Unfortunately I feel quite far from Hashem. Normally I have very emotional and sweet feelings towards Him, I want to grow and be the best I can be, I really try hard in my davening etc. Now I really feel like a deflated balloon in all areas of ruchnius except learning gemara, as some things are starting to click on that end. Just davening to Hashem that he wake my heart back up again because I don't enjoy this feeling of being asleep. Grateful to be clean and healthy today, and good shabbos to everyone here.

Had a nice Shabbos, been getting back into an exercise routine and went for a quick run eruv Shabbos. At the end of the run Hashem popped a nice idea into my mind. It's a simple one and one that probably many already understand, but I feel like I never really understood what oneg Shabbos was. Something about physical indulgence for the honor of Shabbos seemed hard to understand and kind of lofty and hard to engage with. Then a very simple explanation occurred to me. When you understand how special something you have is, then you want to celebrate it. Shabbos is an unbelievable gift from Hashem. If you feel simcha in that knowledge and you want to celebrate it with an extravagant meal, that is all stemming from a recognition for and appreciation of the mitzvah of Shabbos. That recognition and joy is itself a very holy thing as it stems from love of Hashem and His Torah. Anyway like I said it's a simple idea, but it took a little while for this one to click with me.

Day 15, doing pretty well BH. Been having some moments of reflection while listening to shiurim or even just while studying and have realized that my emunah has taken a real hit over the past month or two. I can't really point to a specific cause, but I think I've been so dragged down by my environment and my life stresses that the physical world has kind of closed in around me. With my sense of higher purpose being so camouflaged and far away, everything becomes more difficult. There are paradoxical things happening inside of me. I'm feeling very driven to learn, but at the same time when I hear mention of the greatness and fundamental, total importance of Torah a part of me questions the truth of that. When I hear stories of hashgacha pratis or even just think about life, I sometimes find it hard to feel or think that Hashem runs the world. I'm not talking about a crisis of faith or anything near that dramatic, but I am becoming aware some subconscious tendencies emerging in my mind. But I am just taking it one day at a time and trying to do the right think as best I can. I don't have answers for my current feelings and situation, but I do know who I am at my core and what my life is about and I will just keep trying to do my job as a Jew.

committed_togrowth wrote on 13 Nov 2022 22:57:

So relate to this. Especially the part in the second half. Thanks so much for sharing this. Sometimes just knowing someone relates to what you’re feeling can help!

Teshuvahguy wrote on 13 Nov 2022 23:38:

Thank you Teshuvaguy I appreciate the message

Currently caught in a pretty vicious anxiety spiral. Hard to rationalize my way out of it and in fact the more rationalization I do the worse my evaluation of a current situation seems to become. Definitely have a desire to lean into fantasies or worse but will try to hunker down and weather the storm.

Had some real siyata dishmaya last night. Even though I was really trying, I was having a very hard time calming myself down. Then, when I thought I might just give up as the anxiety was getting too high my internet actually cut off and removed any possibility of a fall BH. I sat down to learn gemara instead, and then I woke up this morning to news that the situation I was worried about was totally resolved. 

Had some pretty interesting reflections today. I found myself towards the end of the day in a state of nisayon. The causes to me were clear, it was the effect of external circumstances that were significantly depressing me and draining me. On the drive home from work I was mentally flipping through possible ways that I may be able to tune out of these negative feelings. Maybe drink some alcohol. Maybe look at something inappropriate. Maybe listen to something inappropriate. I turned on the radio and found a station playing rap music. I thought I might empty my emotions into whatever kind of music was playing, but within seconds I turned it off. It just wasn't me. The total lack of resonance brought me to reflecting on my identity. 



I realize that I have a foot in two worlds. One is the world of my pre-religious life. In times of loneliness and weakness I hearken back to memories of old girlfriends and friends that validated me and made me feel seen at different parts of my life. Memories of the partying, the wildness and ego, drawing on vain values to create a sense of self-worth. I miss the comfort that that world had and some of the people, and in my heart I know I can't and will not go back to that period. Dwelling on it is a sort of misdirected nostalgia. The other foot in in the world of avodas Hashem. My goals in learning. My davening. Visions and dreams of the type of family I want to raise, what kind of person I want to be. Standing between these two worlds I find myself feeling deprived of a past world I can never re-enter and yet unable to dive into the next one. I realize I have stranded myself in the middle, neither here nor there. 



There is a truth to who I am, and it does not exist in this no man's land. The problem is, I don't understand who that true self is. I am disconnected from it. It's a weird feeling, but lately I have been switching to a third party view of myself in any given moment and wondering who this person really is. I am trying to connect this person back to how I felt what I was five, or when I was twelve, times when I felt a more true and salient identity and I marvel at the gap between myself now and who I was then. And, this lack of self-understanding leaves me without the tools I need to align myself and draw satisfaction from my life. When I look at my daily external actions, what I pour my life energy into, it looks like I am trying with all my might to enter the world of avodas Hashem. All I do right now is work and learn, I fight so hard for learning opportunities, I toil in learning Hebrew and Aramaic, I am desperate to be able to learn a blatt gemara. I try my best to daven with a minyan whenver possible, and I am doing everything I can to make it to yeshivah, start dating, and G-d willing start a family. But, there is a gap between the external way in which I invest my energy, and my internal feeling of connection to that mission. I wonder if this is a normal part of growth, that the external manifestation of my desire is coming from a deep place, but my everyday internal world has not yet caught up. I still want the old world and often do not draw nourishment from the new one, so I look to the place where I can find grounding and nourishment in my solitude and existential ambiguity, which is pornography, which is in truth poison. I have not thought about my struggle with kedusha in this perspective before, but I think this gap between my internal and external mode of operation, and the transitional point at which my identity currently sits are a fundamental cause of my difficulties. Not sure if this will be intelligible to anyone, but thank you for reading regardless. And by the way in case you saw my last post on this thread, that situation was resolved, and so I deleted the post.

A post with gadlus, pure gadlus. You will iyh be an awesome father one day...

committed_togrowth wrote on 21 Dec 2022 07:27:

Wow. Just wow. As a late Baal Teshuvah there is so much I want to say to you and ask you…this is a similar feeling to me, having lived for more than 50 years in the party world and now living in Hashem’s world. I need to gather my thoughts. Thanks for this truly amazing post and the opportunity it just gave me to address my similar issues. What a bracha that you wrote this.

Thank you guys for your feedback. HHM, that means so much to me that you said that, and Teshuvaguy, I'm so happy this was helpful for you. Reach out whenever you want to chat I'm sure we can learn a lot from each other.